Workaholic Anonymous
2025 · 5m · Switzerland
Directed by Manuel Held
Genres: dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Nathanaël 'the Great' takes the floor at a Workaholics Anonymous meeting to confess his struggles with overwork. A 5-minute deadpan support-group sketch that plays the recovery confession as absurdist satire of hustle culture.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Taking the most earnest, therapeutic format on the planet and letting a single deadpan confession drain it of all sincerity — this is exactly the kind of subversive premise that makes consensus scouts nervous, and it shouldn't work but absolutely does.
Held's restraint here is the craft decision that matters: a support-group confession stripped of sentiment and catharsis becomes a formal study in how genre conventions collapse under their own weight, sitcom-adjacent but genuinely rigorous.
The singular choice to play every beat of AA protocol with complete seriousness—the pauses, the acknowledgments, the vulnerability—while the content itself annihilates the whole enterprise is what elevates this from sketch comedy into something that justifies five minutes of one performer's face.
Festivals
- Swiss Short Film Competition 2025, 11th Place