Ya Chi Chu
2013 · 11m · España
Directed by Fernando Ruiz
Genres: drama, mystery, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
X, an irritable and compulsive man overwhelmed by his family, withdraws from daily life until the mysterious Y appears and entangles him in a series of strange situations.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
This is exactly the kind of film that makes programmers squirm—a man's withdrawal becomes the hinge for something genuinely unsettling, and instead of resolving into meaning, it just gets *weirder* when Y shows up. Ruiz refuses to explain the strangeness away, and that refusal is the whole point.
Ruiz demonstrates precise control over tone and pacing, building a contemplative interior narrative that deliberately echoes the anxiety-dream logic of early Buñuel and contemporary European surrealism; the formalist restraint is what allows the absurdist register to land.
The film's singular move is how it uses X's compulsive behavior—the small, repeated gestures of a man unraveling—as the visual grammar that makes Y's arrival feel genuinely destabilizing rather than merely weird; that consistency of perspective, held on a tight budget, does all the heavy lifting.