A PLAYFUL SHORT by Cristian Santafé Madueño | Spain, USA | 2025 

Duration: 00:01:48

A hybrid experimental film built from fragments of 16mm found footage and a single Bolex shot recorded by the filmmaker. A child’s voice attempts to assemble a story from images that were never meant to belong together, opening imaginative pathways where narrative becomes speculation and play. 

ARTIST : Cristian Santafé Madueño

CONTACTS / LINKS : vimeo

A Playful Short is a hybrid experimental film that explores how meaning and stories emerge from disparate fragments. Constructed from 16mm found footage juxtaposed with a single analog shot recorded on a Bolex camera, the film destabilizes notions of origin and authorship. Within this shared interpretive space, images produced across different times and contexts collide and coalesce.

The tactile nature of the film’s surface mirrors this interior logic. The visual material undergoes multiple layers of analog transformation: individual frames are hand-painted to connect moments that were otherwise never meant to co-exist, while razor scratches disrupt the emulsion to evoke elements like the wind and the raw act of creation. Through optical printing, the analog material is digitally reconfigured while preserving its physical boundaries—leaving the frame lines and capture edges fully visible to highlight the constructed nature of the piece. For it is not about what is said, but how it is put together.

Guiding this visual collage is a child’s voiceover. Rather than providing a stabilizing commentary, the child speculatively attempts to assemble a cohesive narrative from images that were never meant to belong together. This playful, provisional interpretation aligns with a mode of childhood perception grounded in wonder, recombination, and imaginative world-building—inviting the audience to discover how connections can be forged out of the impossible, and how looking itself can become a form of play.

Director’s statement
In A Playful Short, a child uses fragments of diverse, unconnected 16mm films as toys. Perhaps they were never meant to be placed side by side, but the child’s desire to play and narrate is what matters most. The story that the child—fictional, yet present—assembles is merely an excuse. In the film, a woman approaches a telephone to call an unknown, perhaps unimportant, recipient. What matters is that she occupies the phone so no one else can use it while strong winds buffet a landing airplane—”the line is busy,” a title card states. Faces originally reacting to other scenes and narratives now react to the child’s whim of crashing a plane, simply because those were the tools he had to create with.

The constructed nature of narratives is not inherently bad; it is a constant reminder we need, especially today. Constructing a narrative holds the power to generate alternative meanings and new ways of understanding the reality we inhabit. As Walter Benjamin stated, childhood is a revolutionary mode of perception—an attempt to understand and reconfigure the world as new things are learned. Through education, we achieve adulthood by erasing as much childlikeness as possible, until we forget that a face, a plane, or a telephone can mean something else and express other realities. Perhaps it is time to recover that forgotten child to reconfigure what is presented to us as the one and only absolute reality.

Bio
Born in 1992 in Salou, Tarragona, Cristian transitioned from chemistry studies to storytelling, graduating in Comparative Literature from the University of Granada in 2022. He began his cinematic journey at Cuba’s EICTV with an intensive course in Self-Referential Cinema. Back in Spain, he wrote and directed the short film Un corto de invierno (2023) and earned a Master’s in Screenwriting from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. There, he co-created the series Correos y Telégrafos with Jacobo Palomo and Miguel Fernández, winning the Andalucía South Boost at the South International Series Festival. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2024, Cristian is currently pursuing an MFA in Film & Media Arts, specializing in Film Directing, at Temple University in Philadelphia.

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