La muerte de un burócrata (1966)

Directed by

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Genre

comedy film

Country

Cuba

Runtime

1h 25m

Rated

S

Rating

7.4 of 10 from 51 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A man dies, and his bureaucratic family must navigate endless red tape to get a permit to bury him. The film follows their absurd struggles with the system that is supposed to serve them.

satiricalfarcefrustratedwryabsurdbriskchaoticgrimly comic

What happens

Death of a Bureaucrat (Spanish: La muerte de un burócrata) is a 1966 comedy film by Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea which pokes fun at the Communist bureaucracy and red tape and how it affects the lives of the common people who have to waste time and overcome hurdles just to get on with their ordinary lives. "It is, as the title suggests, a satire on bureaucracy and red tape, but also on a lot of other sad and mediocre things which we have to put up with at times. However, I have to say that I don’t have much faith in the efficacy of satire as a “driving force of history.” When making the film we thought: we are laughing at the bureaucrats, but then the bureaucrats will come and not only will the film make them laugh, but they will laugh at themselves."— Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Director’s Statement, La Biennale di Venezia (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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