Trois
2015 · 5m · España
Directed by Roberto Pérez Toledo
Tones: darkly comic, whimsical
The ménage à trois was invented by the French, in a short shot for the La Palma Rueda section of the Festivalito, the Festival of the Stars.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute absurdist riff that treats cultural mythology like a punchline—the premise alone (France invented the threesome, so here's proof) is so deliberately ridiculous that it circles back into something genuinely subversive about how we mythologize national identity and sex.
Pérez Toledo works within the tradition of festival comedy shorts, particularly the Latin American avant-garde tradition of playful deconstruction, though the execution here trades formal rigor for pure comedic premise.
The real lift is in the commitment to the bit—whatever visual or structural choice grounds this absurdist conceit (the framing? the deadpan tone? the specificity of La Palma's Rueda section) is what transforms a one-liner into a film that lands.