Molinillos
2013 · 4m · España
Directed by Román Reyes
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
An eight-year-old is invited to make a wish and blow out a pinwheel. The story contrasts the wishes of a child with those of an adult, and vice versa.
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The wish-swap premise is clever enough, but it's almost *too* neat—a concept that executes itself, which means Reyes isn't really working against the grain of the idea. I'd bet money he had something stranger in mind and played it safe.
A formally restrained meditation on desire and temporality, positioned squarely in the tradition of poetic children's cinema; the pinwheel as liminal object recalls the best of European short craft, though the execution feels more sketch than fully realized statement.
The genius move here is probably structural—how Reyes splits the four minutes between the child's sprawling, impossible wishes and the adult's narrow, already-compromised ones, using duration itself as the film's argument about what we lose. That's economy working at full intelligence.