
Niños en la alameda
Summary
Sun-baked cobblestones, the honeyed breath of jacarandas, and a quartet of siblings—camera-shy but magnetically alive—dart through the late-morning hush of a provincial plaza. Their chase is less a game than a pagan rite: shoelaces flapping like prayer flags, pockets rattling with marbles that double as planets in their pocket-universe. One boy, the smallest, pauses beneath the bronze gaze of a forgotten conquistador; for a heartbeat the lens lingers on the oxidised green of the statue’s sword, rhyming visually with the emerald glass of the soda bottle clutched in his grimy fist. A sudden cut—no dissolve, no warning—lands us inside the echoing nave of the parish church where candle smoke coils around gilt haloes; the children’s laughter, now muffled, ricochets like trapped sparrows. Back outside, a funeral cortège of ants hauls a dead beetle across a flagstone chessboard, while the eldest sister, all elbows and pre-adolescent defiance, trades a cigarette stub for a single butter-yellow flower from the basket of a wordless flower-seller. The film ends where it began: the alameda, shot from a rooftop at dusk, the kids reduced to fireflies in the bluish grain, their silhouettes swallowed by long shadows that stretch like memories nobody has bothered to confess.
Synopsis
Director
Hermanos Alva




