Treat genre as auteur: On Treat Her Like a Lady

The 2026 film by the Dutch filmmaker offers a fresh and welcome take on the conventions of social cinema by incorporating genre elements with a skillful hand. Through the framework of a dark family comedy, demonstrates the potential of creative innovations within the European festival landscape, acting as an exemplar of the elevated genre film. 

At the Mastercard OFF CAMERA International Festival of Independent Cinema in Kraków, the FIPRESCI jury, evaluating films in the Making Way main dramatic competition, decided to honor Treat Her Like a Lady (2026, Paloma Aguilera Valdebenito, Dutch filmmaker). Shot with a dazzling palette of colors, this story of a mother raising two children in Amsterdam against all economic odds captivates with its remarkable cinematic energy. It is easy to list at least several strengths of the film—yet, its most compelling aspect is undoubtedly its exceptionally skillful use of genre cinema language to tell a deeply personal story. As always, the FIPRESCI jury paid particular attention to film language and the expressive means employed by filmmakers, seeking originality and innovation. This time, however, these qualities did not lie in radical experimentation, but rather, in an authorial use of genre, perhaps a sign of the times and a glimpse of the future, echoing the very notion of “making way” that titles the main section of the Kraków-based festival. That path seems to be unfolding in a direction we would not traditionally expect when thinking about cinema.

In the previous century, we tended to oppose—rather simplistically—genre, understood as a set of conventions and narrative schemes, in favor of the individual expression of auteur cinema. This is typically grounded not only in specific aesthetic preferences but often also in a reservoir of personal memories and experiences that fuel the filmmaker’s imagination. Like any clear-cut opposition, this dichotomy was an oversimplification. Today, in the landscape of contemporary cinema marked by the phenomenon of “elevated genre”, among other things, it is even harder to sustain. This term is most often applied to horror films and occasionally melodramas, particularly those associated with the popular studio A24. Aguilera Valdebenito boldly demonstrates the potential of creating an equivalent of elevated genre within European social cinema, rooted in a strong authorial vision of reality and realized through the genre vehicle of a dark family comedy.

In Treat Her Like a Lady, we witness a critique of an inefficient and unjust welfare system. As the film progresses, the economic struggles faced by a single mother of two daughters intensify. She desperately tries to stay afloat as successive waves of existential and material problems cascade over her like a waterfall. She loses both her social housing and benefits, her partner proves unfaithful, her family offers no support, and her only allies are other economically disadvantaged neighbors. We have seen many such films—more or less successful, more or less harrowing—on European festival circuits over the past decades. Hearing such a description, any cinephile, when handed a coloring book, would seemingly have no trouble solving the hypothetical task: draw the colors in which this story was presumably shot.

Seemingly—because such a viewer guided by habit would, in fact, be mistaken. Instead of browns, grays, shadows, and muted tones, Aguilera Valdebenito unfolds before our eyes an intense pastel profusion of pinks, yellows, reds, and blues. The director wields color and visual composition with mastery, using them as a deftly handled artistic means. This riot of colors gradually fades as the protagonists’ material situation worsens ever more drastically, only for the vehicle carrying the hope of escape and rescue to blaze once again in vivid red at the end. Sales agents attempting to sell the film at international markets would likely resort to the formula: a female version of Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful (1997) meets the Dardenne brothers, and the encounter is painted by Wes Anderson.

The comedic framework does not negate the social themes addressed in the film; rather, it becomes a means of highlighting them, building a strong bond with the main protagonists. This is supported by a fantastic performance from the acting trio portraying the mother and her two daughters—or, instead, a quartet, as one child character is played by twins in order not to overburden the children with long working hours on set. Aguilera Valdebenito’s directorial craft is clearly evidenced by the fact that she achieved this level of acting largely from non-professional or semi-professional performers. The singer and internet personality Nienke Plas plays the role of the mother, and the child performers play the two daughters: Aimee Klaassebos, Kaylyn Smart, and Kiyana Smart. Together, they create a cinematic ode to resilience as a shield against dramatic circumstances and an apologia for familial bonds, particularly the power of a mother’s imagination. This is capable of transforming financial catastrophes into apparent entertainment and quasi-theatrical spectacles that mask the gravity of the situation from the children.

As a familial black comedy, the film’s ending offers hope for liberation from oppression, striking tones akin to the openings of road movies. However, regardless of its genre costume, Treat Her Like a Lady remains a European festival social drama—and such films usually do not have sequels, so we must bid farewell to its protagonists forever in the cinema. Yet, we are hopefully not saying goodbye to the talent of Aguilera Valdebenito, whose craft, sensitivity, and sense of humor so wonderfully revitalize the formula of the social drama. She possesses every qualification to advance to the top tier of European directors, and thus one hopes we will not have to wait long for her next project.

Until that happens, we can savor the cinematic quality of Treat Her Like a Lady. In today’s audiovisual production, numbering tens of thousands of feature-length fiction films annually, it is more difficult than ever to discern trends and dominant tendencies. It is hard to resist the impression of a certain circularity in the history of cinema over the past seven or eight decades and of the aesthetics of cinema as a game played within a finite space. Auteur cinema of the 1960s realized the models of film modernism, which then lay dormant in the 1980s and 1990s, when the dominant aesthetic force—and the current that was radiating freshness—became film postmodernism, with its flirtation with popular culture and genres, humor, and the juggling of conventions. For nearly the entirety of the first two decades of the 21st century, festival triumphs were enjoyed by film neomodernism, which was a return to the aesthetics dominant in the 1960s, now usually in a more intimate form of slow cinema, with less emphasis on the grand modernist figures of Authors with a capital “A” from that era. Today, titles such as Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho), Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau), and Anora (2024, Sean Baker), as well as the horror films of Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, and Robert Eggers, show us what an auteur can do with genre. It would be awkward to call this neo-postmodernism, as the term sounds rather dreadful. Thus, we are left with the aforementioned term “elevated genre” as currently the best possible designation for the tendency within which the film by Aguilera Valdebenito situates itself.

Marcin Adamczak

Edited by Olivia Popp

@FIPRESCI2026