Pintar Como Un Niño
2014 · 8m · España
Directed by Adrián Vereda
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
In Málaga, an old woman, once a painter and now disillusioned in her old age, on a walk with her grandchildren sees before her eyes a smiling little girl whose smile evokes memories of the old colours and the old feeling of a brush and a canvas between her fingers; she then decides to find out what message that mysterious girl is trying to transmit to her on that walk through the city of Málaga and the beauty of its blue sea.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a ghost-girl-as-muse fantasy that could've been treacly nostalgia, but Vereda resists the easy catharsis—the old painter's reckoning with her own irrelevance stays unresolved, which is the only honest move here.
A formally composed meditation on artistic memory and generational transmission; the Mediterranean light becomes as much a character as the figures, echoing a lineage of European cinema concerned with beauty as both redemption and cruelty.
The film hinges entirely on the moment the grandmother recognizes herself in that child's smile—a single exchange of glances that Vereda holds just long enough to make you believe in the transmission of creative longing across time, where a lesser director would've undercut it with sentimentality.