Vortex
2016 · 2m · España
Directed by Al Díaz, Ana Daganzo
Genres: experimental, sci-fi, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
In a pessimistic, discouraging dystopia where humanity turns dark and loses enthusiasm, a woman proposes evolution into a new being. Futurist and vorticist imagery frames a call to recover machine, speed and dynamism in search of a more hopeful vision.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute manifesto that weaponizes vorticist fever dreams against apocalypse-porn—Díaz and Daganzo reject the easy nihilism and propose machine transcendence as radical hope, which is exactly the kind of unfashionable, visually intoxicated contrarianism that makes most festivals squirm and me pay attention.
The film's visual grammar sits deliberately between Futurism's utopian machinery and contemporary dystopian aesthetics, creating a formal tension that demands to be read as conscious positioning within avant-garde lineage; the editing rhythm enforces the vorticist premise rather than merely illustrating it.
The decision to layer human anxious breath and heartbeat against mechanical, accelerating sound design creates a single sensory collision that justifies the entire film's argument—that choice alone transforms what could be didactic rhetoric into something physiologically urgent and genuinely disorienting.