Little Woman Undergoing a Metamorphosis: How to Deal With Grief Under the Mallorcan Sun When You’re a Teenager Dreaming to Be Part of the Adult World
Spanish cinema has been one of the most female-friendly for a while now, thanks to two guys: Carlos Saura, who bravely resisted Franco’s regime, and Pedro Almodóvar, who started the Movida movement. Icíar Bollaín and Carla Simón are just two of the many women leading its revival today. As for the future: It’s looking bright, with 30-something Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. Her first feature film, Forastera, takes place over the course of a summer under the Mallorcan sun, where two sisters lounge on the beach, sharing secrets. One is a pre-teen, the other would like to break free and discover the pleasures and dangers of adulthood, which she constantly observes and envies. So when their grandmother takes a deadly fall, the repercussions are terrible. The mother is overwhelmed by the brutality of this loss, and the grandfather is inconsolable, as his wife was his other half with whom he seemed to share everything. This is an opportunity for the eldest of his granddaughters, Catalina, to get closer to him and enter his fascinating world, where men play cards and share rituals that require more complicity than long speeches.
Forastera is a continuation of the short film Foreigner (Forastera) selected for Cannes Critics Week in 2020. It stars the same lead actress, Zoe Stein. Now five years older, she delves deeper into the ambiguities of her role by donning vintage clothes belonging to her grandmother, whom she has always tried to resemble. However, there is no excessive sexualization of her character, a “little woman” undergoing a metamorphosis. This is undoubtedly where the director’s point of view proves decisive, because if the girl plays at being an adult, it is both out of love for her grandmother, with whom she likes to identify, and to console her grandfather by awakening distant memories in him—of which she knows almost nothing, despite a few clues spotted on yellowed photos. Her gaze is also that of the viewer, whose free will the director respects and considers responsible enough not to have to inflict one of those flashbacks that many films would have settled for out of laziness or convenience. Having carried the project in her heart for years, the filmmaker has weighed each component with care, without ever deviating from her message, which we sense is as intimate as it is essential.
The magic of this family chronicle lies in its sudden shift from carefree innocence to the intrusion of adult concerns, opening a narrow door to the adult world. It is as if Lucía Aleñar Iglesias sees her young heroine in a modern version of Alice in Wonderland, where the past is a secret passageway to the future. It is worth highlighting the quality of the direction of the actors, which is expressed both in the subtlety of Zoe Stein’s performance—drawing on her own experience to bring this character to life, whom she has already played at a different age—and in the restrained performance of veteran actor Lluis Homar. The director’s maturity, and perhaps also her total mastery of her subject, shines through in a mise-en-scène that focuses on the infinitely small, in this case the looks, gestures, and the words that modesty forbids us to utter. Forastera is a film about grief that is less about lamentation and sadness than about the sorrow inherent in regret. The absent woman possesses the posthumous power to reveal the personalities of all those around her, whose destinies she marked in different but indelible ways. Her presence is so strong that she continues to inhabit this space, drawing the film into an extremely modest ghost story. Like a magical ray of sunshine…
Jean-Philippe Guerand
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025