Death of a Bureaucrat

This arresting early work by one of Cuba's foremost film-makers is a black comedy about institutionalised bureaucracy at its most pedantic. After a model factory worker is killed in an accident at work, he's buried with his union card as a mark of eternal solidarity; trouble is, when his wife applies for a pension, she's told she must present the card before she can get any money - and there's a law forbidding exhumation within the first two years of burial. It's a surprising piece to have been made in the Cuba of the mid-'60s, but the laughs come as much from a Buñuelian sense of absurdity as they do from any outright criticism of Castro's regime.