Las manos pequeñas can be placed in that select group, alongside Les Enfants Terribles by Cocteau and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding: uncompromising portraits of childhood that are both unsettling and moving. The seven-year old Marina, recently placed in an orphanage after the accidental death of her parents will become excluded like all her companions, measuring the life she never had and facing the end of the paradise of innocence. Marina discovers that the pain of loving what you do not recognize overlaps with the suffering of not belonging, until imagination creates strategies to overcome reality and invent games: a game that could only be judged seriously, with that particular violence that is only truly expressed in infancy.