Iván & Hadoum

Ian de la Rosa’s debut Iván & Hadoum is a tender, quietly forceful study of masculinity in flux. Set in southern Spain’s greenhouse country, in and around Níjar, the story unfolds against a landscape that looks sun-blessed from afar and industrial up close, a province reshaped by agro-industry “under plastic,” where desire, work, and dignity are all subject to terms and conditions. De la Rosa understands this setting as more than backdrop. The place contains the lovers, shelters them at times, and also corners them. It is a desert that has learned to feed Europe, and the narrative keeps returning to the uneasy fact that the continent’s appetite has a human cost.

Iván (Silver Chicón) works as a forklift operator in the warehouse run by Manuel (Nico Montoya), his late father’s friend and business partner. He is methodical, unshowy, and tired in the particular way of someone who has been told his life will begin once he earns it. A promotion to warehouse manager is dangled as the key that will unlock everything. With it, he can take a loan, buy an apartment, and move his family out of their cramped home. The pressure is not abstract. His mother is worn down; his sister is desperate; her children are present enough to make the household feel both intimate and airless. The promotion becomes less an ambition than a mandate, a measure of whether Iván can be what everyone needs him to be.

Then Hadoum (Herminia Loh) arrives at the warehouse. She takes a job on the packing line, a girl Iván knew from school, Moroccan-descended, sharp-edged and warm, the kind of person whose freedom reads as provocation in a town that survives by keeping its head down. What begins as a flirtation widens into something riskier, a relationship that asks Iván to want without apologising for it. Iván is a trans man, and de la Rosa refuses to treat this as a plot ornament. Instead, it becomes the lens through which the surrounding world is revealed. The town’s acceptance is rarely absolute. It is offered, withdrawn, and used.

That is the narrative’s sharpest insight. Iván’s manhood is constantly being negotiated by the people closest to him, transacted like a resource. His sister invokes it as responsibility, as leverage, as debt. His male friends grant him equality until he threatens the rules that make their own status feel secure. Even the workplace runs on conditional permission. Manuel gives Iván his “chance”, then announces restructuring that would fire some of the line workers. Hadoum, fierce and unafraid of confrontation, pushes back, and Iván is forced into a choice that is not only moral but existential. Who is he when duty and decency pull in opposite directions, and who gets to decide?

Beatriz Sastre’s cinematography answers that question with gentleness rather than rhetoric. Light becomes a currency of absolute kindness. It softens faces without prettifying them, granting both Iván and Hadoum a dimensional humanity that includes their flaws, their pettiness, their hesitation. Silver Chicón anchors Iván as a young man caught between wanting to be good and needing to be useful, between love as refuge and love as risk. Herminia Loh, meanwhile, is electric as Hadoum, capable of karaoke-bar looseness one moment and hard-earned dignity the next. She does not merely “support” Iván’s arc. She challenges it, corrects it, refuses to let his survival instincts become an excuse.

Iván & Hadoum announces de la Rosa as a filmmaker with uncommon emotional precision. The story is intimate, but its concerns are structural. It is about what a town asks of people, what families ask of trans men, and how love can be both shelter and test when the world keeps insisting that acceptance must be earned and justified.

Reviewed on: 17 Feb 2026