Forastera

In her feature debut, Spanish director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias gives the coming-of-age story a haunting spin by examining how we can become estranged from our immediate surroundings, and conversely, how the all too familiar can suddenly become foreign. Forastera, an expansion of the short film of the same name, premiered in the Discovery selection of last year’s Toronto Film Festival, winning the FIPRESCI jury prize.

Catalina (Zoe Stein) and her sister Eva (Martina Garcia) are spending the summer at their grandparent’s house in Mallorca, while their mother (Núria Prims) is away. Over at the grandparents’, the atmosphere is patriarchal; grandpa Tomeu (Lluís Homar) is spending a lot of time with his friends or passing the time in other ways, while grandma Catalina (Marta Angelat) – who bears the same name as the main heroine – is the bedrock of the entire household.

Upon returning from a date with a boy she met on the beach that day, Catalina discovers her grandmother has died following a fatal fall from a railing. The loss of the backbone of the household and its beating heart, pushes Tomeu only further into isolation that borders on cruelty toward his family. However, one thing manages to bring the best out of him. The presence of granddaughter Catalina who bears a striking resemblance to her late grandmother and who increasingly becomes pulled in by the idea of turning into her grandmother entirely. An obsession which brings the long gone joy in her grandfather, but also worries Catalina’s mother as to the potential consequences or implications of Cata’s whimsical pretending. Once she can’t remove the drawn mole on her chin, and strangers over the phone confuse the young and old Catalina, what perhaps seemed like pretending adds the connotations of something bigger being at play.

Although the set-up seems quite simple and familiar at the surface, both narratively and visually (sometimes to the film's detriment), what Aleñar Iglesias manages to pull off on both of those fronts, is to present the ordinary world as loaded with meaning. For example, a wide image of a dolphin-shaped inflatable, drifting in the opposite direction from Catalina, adds to the otherwise haunted atmosphere of inanimate objects appearing as if they have life; of some other force (her grandmother) being present. However, later on, Catalina retells the encounter exactly as if she has indeed seen the real dolphin. This whimsical outlook is further substantiated with the leitmotif of light refractions that represent the presence of grandma’s spirit, or at least it’s heavily implied.

The familiar scenes always have a subdued, haunting feeling to them, which stems from the main character’s whimsical relationship to the world around her, but also from the way people relate to those around them. The crux of the film is the relationship between the grandfather and his granddaughter Catalina. After the death of his wife, the grandfather retreats into himself, and Catalina takes it as a challenge to make him find a new will to keep on living; however, in doing so, the young Catalina ends up evoking too much of the old one. At the beginning of the film, he is supposed to give driving lessons to his granddaughter, which he doesn’t do out of lack of interest and laziness. But once he sees the remnants of his late wife in his granddaughter, he starts spending more and more time with her, which in a way brings him closer to his late wife, whom he took for granted while she was still alive.

This turn of events bears some uncomfortable implications, and Catalina’s mother is aware of this, trying to prevent the relationship before it develops into something inappropriate. But what ends up happening is that this very relationship starts to break down the barriers the elders in the family have barricaded themselves behind. When Tomeu agrees to teach Catalina to drive, the scene soon develops into an argument that resembles one between a married couple, even though it’s a grandfather–granddaughter relationship, but these fixed lines only serve as an excuse not to confront the secrets Tomeu has been keeping inside himself, which he is now unable to share with his late wife. Forastera presents us with a world where everyone keeps traces of the people who are no longer there, of the people who left their mark on them.

Reviewed on: 14 Oct 2026