Maspalomas

Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga, two thirds of the Basque Moriarti collective behind Handia and Marco, competed at San Sebastián in 2025 with a film about an old man going back into the closet. José Ramón Soroiz took the Silver Shell for Best Leading Performance for it.

Vicente has spent his later years in Maspalomas, the resort on Gran Canaria where a gay man of his generation could finally live openly. A fall and a diagnosis send him to a residential home in the Basque Country, near the daughter he barely knows, among staff and residents who assume a great deal. The film is about what he does with that — and the directors resist every opportunity to make it either a tragedy or a triumph.

Soroiz, a stage actor for four decades, plays it almost entirely in small adjustments of posture and silence. Spanish critics called it the most humane film of the festival, and it works as a companion to the catalogue's other recent Spanish entries about who gets to be visible: this one is about a man who was, briefly, and then had it taken away by a corridor full of strangers.