Summer 1993

Carla Simón's first feature is autobiography with the names changed barely at all: her own mother died of an AIDS-related illness when she was six, and she was raised afterwards by an uncle and aunt in the Catalan countryside. It won the GWFF prize for best first feature at the Berlinale in 2017 along with the Generation Kplus grand prix, then took the Goya for Best New Director and became Spain's Oscar submission.

Frida arrives at the farmhouse in the summer of 1993 with a suitcase and a doll. Esteve and Marga are kind, careful and completely unequipped; their daughter Anna is three and does not understand why this older girl has appeared. The film is constructed almost entirely from the child's eye level, and Simón lets whole scenes play out in the middle distance of adult conversation that Frida catches only fragments of — the word nobody in the family will say aloud, the neighbours who tell their children not to touch her.

Laia Artigas was five when she was cast and gives one of the great performances by a small child in recent European cinema: watchful, occasionally cruel, testing. Critics compared it to Víctor Erice and to Ponette, and it launched a Catalan-language new wave that Simón herself extended with Alcarràs. It is a film about grief that never once uses the word, and it is very nearly unbearable in the last twenty minutes.