El problema
2008 · 8m · España
Directed by Adrián Gutiérrez
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, family
Arcadio Preciado is a boy with a great imagination, and he will need all his inventiveness to solve the difficult problem his mathematics teacher has set him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A math problem as McGuffin for a kid's imagination spree—it's the kind of premise that sounds like every other coming-of-age whimsy until you realize Gutiérrez is doing something genuinely odd with it, which almost makes the ordinariness work in its favor.
The film sits comfortably in the lineage of magical-realism children's cinema, with clear formal attention to how fantasy sequences are stitched into mundane reality—competent, even elegant, though it doesn't quite push against the tradition it inhabits.
What elevates this is the decision to let Arcadio's solutions actually *fail* within his fantasies before he returns to the real problem—that specific rhythm of imagination meeting consequence, played with real restraint on an 8-minute budget, is what makes the whimsy land instead of float away.