You can't eat your money
2021 · 1m · Iran
Directed by Kiarash Ardeshirpour
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A super wealthy family sits at their dinner table looking desperate — their cruelty toward nature has left nothing to eat but their actual money.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute premise so gleefully perverse—wealthy people literally eating their money because they've murdered the planet's capacity to feed them—that it shouldn't work but does, landing somewhere between Jonathan Swift and a fever dream that knows exactly what it's doing.
The absurdist escalation tracks a clear lineage through Bunuel and contemporary dark fable-making, though the compression into one minute leaves little room for the formal precision that would elevate this beyond a clever concept into something architecturally necessary.
That single image of desperation at a table full of currency instead of food—the casting choice to play it straight rather than comedic—does all the heavy lifting; it's the kind of restraint and commitment in the performance that transforms a one-liner into a moment with teeth.