The Beloved

Rodrigo Sorogoyen reached the Cannes main competition for the first time with El ser querido, which premiered on 16 May 2026 and opened in Spain that August. Written, as always, with Isabel Peña, it is his most direct film about his own trade — and his first with a star of Javier Bardem's magnitude, which the festival received with a seven-minute ovation.

Bardem plays Esteban Martínez, a director whose legend is inseparable from a history of violence and excess, and who casts his estranged daughter Emilia, played by Victoria Luengo, in a desert epic shooting on Fuerteventura. Sorogoyen builds the film out of long, unbroken conversations, giving his two leads the kind of extended real-time exchanges that most contemporary cinema has edited out of existence. Marina Foïs, from As Bestas, returns among a cast that also includes Melina Matthews, Raúl Arévalo and Malena Villa; the running time is a considerable 135 minutes and the film uses all of it.

Reviews out of Cannes were strong — 88% on Rotten Tomatoes — with particular attention paid to Luengo, who holds the screen opposite Bardem throughout, and to Sorogoyen's willingness to make a film about a filmmaker without flattering the profession. It went home without a prize from a jury that gave the Palme to Cristian Mungiu's Fjord, but it confirmed him as a fixture of the competition circuit.