Cotton Candy
2008 · 11m · España
Directed by Aritz Moreno
Genres: experimental, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
An atemporal fable about how difficult it is to prepare to go out into the street in winter, inspired by a Julio Cortázar tale.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Cortázar adaptation that actually *resists* adapting—turning a literary premise into pure visual stalling, where nothing happens and everything matters. It's the kind of patient, oblique thing that makes most people check their phones, which is precisely why it's worth defending.
Moreno's atemporal fable sits comfortably in the lineage of Jodorowsky and Cocteau, where surrealism serves contemplation rather than spectacle; the economy of the eleven-minute form and the formal restraint of its visual language demonstrate a director thinking deliberately about what cinema can do that literature cannot.
The film's entire architecture hangs on the decision to make the preparation—the hesitation, the small ritual gestures—the actual subject rather than scaffolding; that reframing choice, born from constraint, is what transforms a simple premise about winter into something that lingers.