25 Watts

Black and white, 35mm
Uruguay, 2000, 94 min
Section: Forum of Independents

Synopsis

Saturday morning, seven o’clock, Montevideo, Uruguay. Leche, Javi and Seba are still up. Bored, they hang around the streets and drink cheap beer. Leche should be studying, since he has an Italian exam. Unfortunately he is distracted by all kinds of things: he has fallen in love with his teacher, he has to look after his senile grandmother and his neighbour has lost his dog. Javi has already completed his studies, but the only job he could find was driving around the neighbourhood with a sound system on his car roof, listening to stupid commercials blaring out of the car’s loudspeakers. The only hope in his life is his girlfriend Maria, but she is just about to dump him. The youngest of them, quiet Seba, keeps bumping into the strangest types. The endless boredom of the main heroes is depicted in a humorous and self-ironical way in black-and-white images, reminiscent of Jarmusch’s early films.

About the director

Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll (both born in 1974 in Montevideo) met at the University of Montevideo, where they did media studies. They also wrote and filmed an animation series together called El service.