‘Pitiguá’ is the kind of short film that follows the South American tradition of storytelling. Paula Martínez Cirilo’s animation tells the story of a simple event, and even so the viewer gets the whole package of emotions and insights. ‘Pitiguá’ is the story of time, the story of how we get from one day to another, the story of all that is and that isn’t. ‘Pitiguá’ compresses in less than three minutes the history of the world as we know it. Of course, at first it might not seem like it, but watch it again and think about it for a second.

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When we first watched this short we didn’t know how to feel about it. Though it was really well made, the narrative didn’t speak to us at first. Then we went to watch it again and it unveiled right in front of our eyes: ‘Pitiguá’ deals with the transition from day to night. This whole process is actually the core of time, the core of past, present, and future. Without it, we couldn’t understand how life works. This is the reason why we said before that ‘Pitiguá’ is presenting history as we know it now because it took one very small piece and placed it under the microscope so we could easily see its importance. And with this, we come back to what we’ve mentioned in the beginning – the charm of the South American storytelling. As many majestic authors did in the past, Cirilo saved herself the trouble of narrating a whole big tale and instead took the most important and descriptive matters from it and placed it on a display table so anyone can see it as it is. From that moment on, the sky became the limit! Of course, each and every one of us can interpret what happens in this animation in their own particular way, and this is the beauty of ‘Pitiguá’ – it’s the kind of story that writes itself as it develops.

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Written by Vlad A. G