about

When a single mother’s struggle for government food rations results in being handed a plastic superhero toy of the president, her reality slowly bleeds into the absurd world of a real-life propaganda cartoon.

Bigote or (The Happy Anarchy Of Bureaucracy) is a narrative short film and graphic novel, based on real events.

Bigote is a direct response to the standardized "violence/misery-porn" representation of the Venezuelan crisis. The film proposes a different approach to depicting humanitarian crises by focusing on a universal third form of violence: bureaucracy.

Rather than leaning into the codes of a traditional narrative drama, the film turns the weapons of state control—television, toys, and comics—against themselves. Bigote operates on a strict structural axis: a slow-burn study of systemic starvation, fractured by a hyper-saturated camp live-action re-enactment of an actual Venezuelan state cartoon, exposing how childhood innocence is exploited and manipulated through vessels of soft power.

Bigote is a Trojan Horse designed to reject cinematic oversimplifications of real-world, ongoing humanitarian crises—especially when reality transpires as far more absurd than propaganda.