cotton seas. poetic images for a childhood experience (reading of the film valentín)

Abstract

This text is a philosophical interpretation of the film VALENTÍN (Alejandro Agresti, 2002). It approaches the narrative of the cinematographic script as a permanent exercise of the child’s way of asking, living, creating, dreaming, loving, thinking, being happy. In a desolate world of adults without answers, Valentín makes of his life and stories an experience of infancy that interrogates, that asks, that looks for projects to create experiences of dialogue and love with those around him. Valentín teaches philosophizing to the school, to the family, to the friends, and to philosophy itself, and in that teaching he traces a history for himself and holds up mirrors to the other; he makes of his questions the questions of the world around him. He makes of his questions our own questions--the questions of today, of always. Those are the ones we seek to interrogate here, in order to see a lonely childhood in a lesson of philosophizing, and to understand Valentin’s childhood as the poetic challenge to build a world of love and poetic transformation of himself, of the others, of ourselves.