Anti-authoritarian animation from Cuba.
Over a cracked and bleak landscape, a city is cut into crust of the earth. From above, rows upon rows of flat, interlocked square rooftops show the rigid and confining nature of life here. The people shuffle out, silent, uniformed, faceless as thumbs.
The only voice is that of their ruler, a figure in military greens, a red square on his cap, his shoulders. His confident, rageful voice bellows over the tannoys across the city, spewing his ideas as the only reality.
The people of the city spend their days at rows of desks, repeatedly stamping documents, punching them with a red square stamp. They trudge home past the block red posters. But one figure hovers by one whose corner is starting to come away from its wall, and there, a little white triangle cuts into the colour. And an idea forms.
The title riffs off the Cormac McCarthy classic No Country For Old Men, which in a very different way, also speaks to a sense of futility in a world filled with incomprehensible human violence. The animation uses Soviet iconography in a clear critique of Soviet authoritarianism, but its dystopian depiction of oppression of governance and labour is universally recognisable.