Andrew scott crowns a 10-minute riot where grandpas defeat ai with duct tape and beeps
A minivan reverses down an Austin alley while an 80-year-old Gujarati grandfather, lashed to the bumper with silver tape, shouts curb measurements in place of an ultrasonic sensor. The crowd at SXSW howled so hard the bar ran out of whiskey sours before the credits rolled. That was the moment Pranav Bhasin’s 600-second mockumentary We Were Here hijacked the festival from the same AI startups that paid for most of the open bars.
The algorithm gets a wedgie
Bhasin’s premise is deliciously simple: retired engineers in Baroda refuse to surrender their dignity to machines, so they re-insert themselves into the labour chain—literally. One becomes a human turnstile, arms out, clicking a counter. Another impersonates a smart fridge by squatting inside one and announcing the milk expiry date. Shot on a shoestring, the film feels like Jackass scripted by Tagore, balancing slapstick with a quiet ache about obsolescence.
Andrew Scott, in town as both judge and patron saint of Redbreast Unhidden, watched the short twice in one day. “It’s the first time I’ve seen technology mocked without cruelty,” he told me inside a humid hotel courtyard, cream suit still immaculate despite the 31 °C heat. “The gag lands because the retirees aren’t afraid—they’re amused. That’s revolutionary right now.”
Whiskey, mentorship and the war on brainrot
Redbreast created Unhidden to stop short films from disappearing into the TikTok undertow. Last year the Irish distillery handed Scott a ceremonial title; this year they gave him a chequebook. He can green-light the winner’s next project outright. Bhasin’s prize: Scott will executive-produce his debut feature, already titled Minimum Human Requirements, a satire about gig-economy saints in Mumbai.
Scott remembers his own 17-year-old self on the set of Korea, terrified by cables and call sheets, until veteran actor Donal Donnelly knelt beside him and whispered, “Confidence is just curiosity in a good jacket.” The line stuck. Now he repeats it to every nervous filmmaker he meets, though he swaps “jacket” for “whiskey” when the bar is near.
The timing is not accidental. Disney swallowed Fox, Amazon inhaled MGM, and streamers slash development slates to pay for algorithmic recommendation engines. Against that consolidation, a ten-minute film made for the price of a used hatchback feels like a pirate broadcast inside a gated castle.
The metrics that don’t fit in a spreadsheet
Studio executives speak of “content minutes” and “stickiness.” Scott speaks of loneliness. “If a short makes strangers laugh in the same room, that’s a small vaccine against isolation,” he says, eyes locking on mine to confirm I’m not taking notes for a data dashboard. “No AI can script the specific squeak of duct tape when a grandfather waddles attached to a bumper. That sound is the fingerprint of a human moment.”
Bhasin, soft-spoken and 29, admits he shot the ending first because he feared the police would shut them down before lunch. They didn’t. Instead, a real-life traffic cop asked for a photo with the cast, then volunteered to direct traffic for the final scene. Try coding that spontaneity.
As Austin’s neon fades and the festival tents fold, the tally is refreshingly analog: one roll of duct tape, five retired engineers, a minivan borrowed from an uncle, and a 170-year-old whiskey brand betting that soul still beats scale. The algorithm will keep crunching, but for now the humans are ahead—beeping proudly in reverse.