Viejo Pascuero
1993 · 3m · France
Directed by Jean-Baptiste Huber
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Jaimito, a small boy from the slums of Santiago who behaved all year to earn a fine Christmas, finds only a top, a trumpet and a plastic ball under his bed — and writes Santa Claus a furious, expletive-laden letter of complaint.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A kid from the Santiago slums weaponizing profanity against the Santa Claus industrial complex—it's the anti-heartwarming Christmas film that shouldn't work but does, precisely because it refuses the sentimental trap every other film would've walked into.
Huber's restraint in the execution—the flatness of the letter-writing conceit, the refusal to sentimentalize poverty—positions this within a lineage of formally rigorous satire that distrusts emotional shortcuts, though the 1993 moment does date its irony.
The decision to let a child's fury speak entirely through written word rather than performed outrage transforms a simple premise into something genuinely unsettling; that formal constraint is what makes the complaint land as social critique instead of just a gag.
Reviews
En utilisant les armes du rire et du cynisme, Jean-Baptiste Huber en profite pour attirer l'attention du spectateur sur les répercussions de l'extrême précarité qui règne au sein des bidonvilles et dont les plus petits, pas toujours désirés, sont les premières victimes. En confrontant tradition et condition sociale sur un ton explosif, le court-métrage « Viejo Pascuero » met en lumière des phénomènes sociaux tels que l'influence, les normes, le conformisme ou encore la comparaison sociale.