Circles of Faith, Desire, and Ambition: Karla Badillo's Oca
The FIPRESCI jury encountered a wide range of Mexican films at the 41st Guadalajara International Film Festival, many of them grappling with violence, faith, justice, and social inequality. Among them, Karla Badillo’s Oca stood apart through its unusual narrative structure and elusive symbolism, inviting multiple interpretations while following several characters whose journeys gradually converge.
As members of the FIPRESCI jury, we had the opportunity to watch a range of compelling films across different sections of the 41st Guadalajara International Film Festival (FIGC). Without exaggeration, I can say that most of the films possessed a distinctive quality, whether visual, thematic, or at least an ambition to move beyond conventional storytelling. Not all succeeded entirely. City of the Dead (Ciudad de Muertos, 2026, José Manuel Cravioto) for instance, featured striking imagery, yet faltered on a narrative level. I admired The Rest Is Memory (Lo que nos van dejando, 2026, Issa García-Ascot Ogarrio) for its slow pace and restraint, particularly in its refusal to depict a horrific incident directly or cram the film with dramatic action. The audience is deliberately kept at a distance. Searching for Her (Se busca, 2026, Kenya Marquez) begins as a coming-of-age drama before transforming into a search for a mother in a border city haunted by violence and poverty, forces that remain outside the frame of the story yet cast a shadow over everyday life. Se busca develops a friendship, sisterhood, and a form of forbidden love between two girls, each lonely in her own way, while the mother’s cruel act becomes one of the film’s most affecting moments. The Circle of Liars (El círculo de los mentirosos, 2026, Nancy Cruz Orozco), though perhaps less satisfying narratively and populated with somewhat familiar character types, succeeds in conveying the complexity of human relationships. Rather than dividing characters into categories of good and bad, it portrays them as possessing contradictory combinations: compassionate yet selfish, caring yet cowardly, vulnerable and weak.
In the documentary section, we watched four films, among which Dear Fátima (Querida Fátima, 2026, Lorena Gutiérrez Rangel, Su Kim, Jesús Quintana Vega, Rodrigo Reyes, Dawn Valadez, Davi Merchan) and The Same Blood (La misma sangre, 2025, Angel Ricardo Linares Colmenares) stood out. In both works, the central figures seek justice for the killing of their loved ones. The films confront directly the violence, murder, and femicide that have persisted in Mexico for years and continue to remain urgent social issues. More broadly, across both the documentary and fiction selections at the festival, recurring themes emerged: entrenched patriarchy, male violence, the suppression of women, and the failures of corrupt political and governmental structures. Whether approached through intimate personal stories or fictional narratives, many of the films portrayed societies shaped by fear, inequality, impunity, and unresolved violence, where institutions meant to protect often appear absent, indifferent, or complicit.
It was not an easy deliberation, as Querida Fátima was a strong contender. With its compelling storytelling and deeply empathetic characters, its humanistic approach moved not only us but also the audience at FICG, where it received three awards. Our final winner, however, was Oca, a bizarre and elusive debut from director Karla Badillo. The film follows Rafaela, a young nun who experiences visions and dreams and is tasked by the convent’s Mother Superior with traveling to San Vicente to meet a newly appointed archbishop and seek support and funding for their nearly abandoned congregation. One might assume that Rafaela’s journey will become a familiar narrative of spiritual doubt, rediscovered faith, or its rejection. While questions of belief indeed shape part of the story, the film avoids any conventional or predictable revelation. Instead, it gradually expands to encompass several characters across four narrative strands, all of whom are traveling toward San Vicente. Rafaela, largely remaining passive and looking inward, encounters them along the way; through them, we witness human frailties, weakness, hypocrisy, selfishness, deceit, and fragility.
The film’s title derives from the Game of the Goose (Oca), in which players move forward or backward in circles according to the numbers they roll. In a similar way, the characters in Oca appear trapped within a circular mountainous landscape that offers neither clear direction nor any real possibility of escape.
What affected me most upon first watching the film was its cinematography, particularly the positioning and movement of the camera. From the opening shot, the camera asserts itself almost as an independent presence: it first captures a plane crossing the sky, then tilts downward and dollies back to reveal Rafaela from behind, gazing at the distant aircraft. In this way, the first image functions as a point of view that simultaneously reveals the observer. This strategy recurs throughout the film. Without relying on literal subjective shots, the camera conveys the characters’ perceptions, emotions, and inner states. Its movements and angles often feel unpredictable, shifting suddenly into sharp high or low angles. These visual choices align closely with the film’s central thematic concerns: the position of God in relation to humanity, as well as Rafaela’s obscured ambitions and spiritual uncertainties.
Then we hear Rafaela’s inner voice as she speaks to God, the Father, another technique that is used throughout the film. The setting itself appears strangely surreal: the old convent has no roof, its ceiling apparently destroyed only recently, yet everything else remains neat, meticulous, and almost unnaturally clean. Even though the nuns live in the middle of nature, there is no trace of dust, mud, or decay, giving the film an oddly cartoonish quality. At the same time, certain actions are depicted with striking physical detail, such as the scene in which another nun cuts Rafaela’s hair with a knife and accidentally slices her own hand. We also begin to sense the Mother Superior’s dubious intentions when she sends Rafaela away to find the archbishop despite knowing that she does not know the route.
Once Rafaela leaves the convent, the film abruptly shifts its attention to another girl in a different location. She sits on a bucket, staring at something outside the frame while the sound of fireworks is heard in the distance. The girl, Rogelia, looks ahead, but the film withholds her point of view from us. Instead, the camera dollies backward; she stands, walks toward the camera, and exits the frame, yet the camera refuses to follow her. Through a sudden cut, the film moves to a shot beginning at the top of a chapel before slowly descending toward the villagers preparing for a pilgrimage. They carry the statue of their saint to San Vicente in order to welcome the archbishop and seek his blessing. Gradually, Rogelia emerges as the film’s quiet observer, perhaps even its moral center, someone who sees and understands more than the others, yet is continually humiliated, particularly by her father. This sequence reveals Badillo’s remarkable ability to introduce characters organically, while constructing subtle connections and relationships between them.
The third story begins at a military base, where an unspoken tension exists between the commander and one of the officers, a paratrooper, though the nature of their conflict initially remains vague. At first, it is difficult to connect their storyline to that of Palmira, the mysterious upper-class woman dressed in black who leads the fourth narrative thread. Only toward the end of the film do we fully grasp the underlying story of love, infidelity, and revenge that binds them together. Unlike Rafaela and the villagers traveling in search of spiritual meaning or blessing, Palmira is a nonbeliever. She travels with her driver, Manuel, to meet her lover, the paratrooper, at the San Vicente airport, making their journey driven by personal desire rather than faith. Palmira appears deeply anguished and detached from the realities of ordinary working-class life and its hardships. In one of the film’s cruel ironies, echoing the arbitrary turns of the Game of Oca, Palmira’s car strikes the paratrooper on the road. She orders Manuel not to stop, unknowingly becoming responsible for the death of the very man she came to meet.
Yet the film does not naively portray the other pilgrims as figures of pure spiritual devotion either. One of Oca’s greatest strengths lies in the way it exposes the villagers’ weaknesses, resentments, and selfish impulses beneath performances of piety. A middle-aged woman who leads the group constantly gossips, manipulates others, and spreads accusations. Out of envy and malice, she even prevents Rafaela’s motorcycle from being repaired when the nun is stranded on the road. Though she presents herself as devout, she secretly engages in an adulterous affair, something witnessed only by Rogelia. In these moments, Oca dismantles any simplistic opposition between the sacred and the sinful, revealing instead a world in which faith, hypocrisy, desire, and cruelty coexist within the same individuals.
The film’s ending is both rewarding and deeply unsettling, leaving ample room for interpretation. It unfolds almost entirely within a surreal realm, as though detached from concrete reality. The archbishop stands at the top of a narrow ladder while Rafaela, weak, sleepy, and dizzy, slowly climbs toward him to speak about the convent’s hardships. Yet he pays little attention to their struggles. Instead, he extends his hand, adorned with the symbolic rose ring, expecting Rafaela to kiss it. In a sudden and startling gesture, however, she overturns the ladder, causing both of them to fall.
A few minutes later, the film returns to an image of Rafaela from behind, gazing at the sky, echoing the opening shot. But her appearance has changed: she is now wearing the archbishop’s clothes and ring before finally placing his hat upon her head, as though she has assumed his position. The final shot shows Rafaela back at the convent in the archbishop’s attire, giving the entire sequence the quality of a dream or hallucination. The archbishop’s fall and Rafaela’s symbolic replacement of him can be read as the collapse of the patriarchal order governing the Catholic church, as well as Rafaela’s desire to transcend the limited role imposed upon her as a nun. The ending ultimately raises a larger question: whether she is capable of reshaping her own destiny or remains trapped within the same circular world that the film has constructed from the beginning.
Azadeh Jafari
Edited by José Teodoro
@FIPRESCI2026