The best compliment I can give your film is that I liked it a lot better the day after I watched it. It nagged at me, kept me thinking. And last night, when I sat down to review a few scenes, I liked it even more. Instead of 10 or 15 minutes, as I'd planned, I spent more than an hour with the film last night and didn't do any fast-forwarding until 25 minutes in.

Your approach to montage is almost completely successful, I think. You cut more quickly than I prefer, but it's sustained and consistent, and it gives greater importance to the occasional long take. My one complaint--and I'm not sure if I can justify this rationally or if it's just a gut response--is that I don't care for the jump zooms. After the opening scenes, you don't use them frequently, but they're always a bit jarring. I guess I don't mind an editor stealing my gaze, but when the camera person commandeers things--and when I become suddenly attentive to the fact that a camera person has commandeered things--the aesthetic breaks a little bit.

I also want to compliment your work with the actors. I assume you had a pretty high shooting ratio? All of the leads are so at ease in front of the camera, which makes me think you had it on them a lot, the little boy especially. And I could watch Katherine Celio all day. She belongs in an Eric Rohmer film. The father is also quite good, which is especially impressive since you seem to have gone out of your way to distance us from him. Can I assume that his being fairly tall isn't the only reason you almost always shot him from low angles? To be blunt, it annoyed the hell out of me during my first viewing, and if I'd sent this email that night I might have written something like, "Dammit, Alejandro, don't you realize that this is Daisy's film? Cut the run time in half and you'll have an amazing little character piece." But watching the film again last night, I was completely fascinated by him. He does a nice job with a really difficult role.