There are only four buildings in this city, separated by a highway with no beginning or end, all of them sustained by a large rock levitating aimlessly in outer space: a hotel whose guests are sardines, a restaurant with no clients served by rodents, a call centre with monkeys as operators and an empty supermarket supplied by a canine in charge of replenishing products. Through a series of shots that range from songs to tap-dance performances and Berkeley-like choreographies, from comic scenes to suffocating ones, this magnificent animation is not only a show-off of technique but moves, on its whole, towards something terrible, profound, moving and melancholic, where music works as a caustic mockery redeeming the characters’ lethargy and existential sadness. Swedish filmmaker Niki Lindroth von Bahr, a first-timer at Vila do Conde, explores once again human relations/emotions through the lens of fable also used in her four previous short films. However, in this one she creates a shortcut of a new surrealism lying somewhere between Roy Andersson and David Lynch. (SR)