La tuerca
2007 · 10m · España
Directed by Azul Melissa Martínez
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
The story of a girl and a nut, and of an adult woman who has lost all contact with dreams: about magic, memories and the meaning of the small things we forget when we have grown up.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A girl-and-a-nut fable sounds like whimsy-by-numbers, but Martínez somehow makes the memory-loss angle genuinely unsettling—this isn't saccharine nostalgia, it's a quiet indictment of how adulthood murders wonder, and that's refreshingly bleak.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of Latin American magical realism and coming-of-age cinema, with deliberate pacing and visual restraint that recalls the formalist traditions of children's literature adaptations—a measured approach to an archetypal loss.
What makes this work is the economy of the object itself—a nut as vessel for everything about forgotten enchantment—and the editing rhythm that lets you *feel* the gap between the girl's world and the woman's amnesia without explaining it.