Sundays

Sundays (Los domingos) is the second feature by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, following Cinco lobitos (2022) and her Movistar Plus+ series Querer (2024), two works she has described as bricks in the house of this one. It premiered in the main competition of the 73rd San Sebastián International Film Festival in September 2025 and won the Golden Shell, along with the FIPRESCI prize. It also won top prizes at the Forqué and Feroz awards, and took five at the 40th Goyas, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Set in the Basque Country and shot in Bilbao, it follows Ainara, a seventeen-year-old who returns from a religious retreat intent on exploring a vocation as a cloistered nun. Her widowed father, preoccupied with his restaurant and a new partner, temporises; her aunt Maite, an atheist, is aghast. Newcomer Blanca Soroa plays Ainara with a quiet, unreadable conviction, opposite Patricia López Arnaiz, whose Maite won the Goya for Best Actress, and Nagore Aranburu as the convent's mother prioress, a second acting Goya. Bet Rourich's cinematography and Andrés Gil's editing were both nominated.

The film holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. In Screen, Jonathan Romney praised how elegantly it fuses the coming-of-age film with the crisis-of-faith drama; El País called it a sober, ambiguous family drama that declines to pick a side in the debate it stages. That refusal to take sides became a talking point in Spain, where the film drew more than 700,000 admissions, a remarkable figure for so austere a subject.