Xmile
2016 · 14m · España
Directed by Miguel Ángel Font Bisier
Genres: experimental, satire, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Applications designed to save us have become marketing and entertainment tools that trap people inside their own bodies, turning society into sentimental robots. In such a society, how much would a genuine smile be worth?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that punches straight through tech-utopia cheerleading and asks what happens when wellness apps become instruments of behavioral capture—most scouts would hedge this into safer sci-fi territory, but Font Bisier leans into the absurdist teeth of it. Exactly the kind of film that makes people uncomfortable in the right way.
The film sits deliberately in the lineage of dystopian satire from Godard through contemporary video essays, using formal restraint and montage to build its argument about sentiment as commodity; the craft is in what it refuses to sentimentalize about its own subject matter.
The decision to price a genuine smile—to literalize emotional authenticity as a scarce market good—is the hinge that transforms what could've been a familiar tech-skeptic screed into something that actually *means* something about late capitalism and the body.