25 Watts

The 2001 Uruguayan film by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll follows a day in the lives of three young men in Montevideo. None of them does anything: one pretends to study for an exam, one delivers pornographic tapes, one nothing at all. The story is not incident but the emptiness itself. Shot in black and white, it was one of the works that opened international visibility for Uruguayan cinema. Its humour is dry and delayed; the jokes do not land, they seep. Rebella and Stoll are interested in what being young in a provincial capital does to the experience of time. That the story deliberately arrives nowhere may irritate some viewers. Rebella died in 2006. Who it's for: viewers who like Latin American independent cinema and dry humour. Who it's not for: anyone wanting plot, or put off by crude jokes.