La moneda (The Coin)
2019 · 7m · China
Directed by Siqi Song
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
At Chinese New Year, finding the coin hidden in a Jiaozi dumpling brings good luck. A girl loses a jar on her journey to a new country containing the lucky coins she has been collecting since she was a child; her new life begins with the search for the coin.
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The premise wraps itself in folklore comfort—lucky coins, New Year's blessing, immigrant arrival—but then just... lets the girl search. No twist, no subversion, no knife underneath the sentiment. It's competent melancholy, which is almost worse than bad.
Song situates this clearly in the lineage of lyric essay and diasporic coming-of-age cinema, with a formalist patience that trusts the visual metaphor of lost-then-found to carry philosophical weight—the kind of restraint that reads as maturity on the festival circuit.
The decision to make the jar's contents weightless—coins as objects that matter only because they're *hers*—lets Song build an entire film about displacement on a single, held close-up; that specificity of emotional logic is what makes a seven-minute immigrant story feel inevitable rather than didactic.