Director: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias
Writer: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias
Stars: Zoe Stein, Lluís Homar, Núria Prims, Nonni Ardal, Martina García
Synopsis: During her Mallorca summer, Antonia recognizes similarities with her late grandma. She develops an influence over her mourning grandpa through dress-up, blurring who inhabits who.
Grief does strange things to the people experiencing it, especially when that grief comes on in sudden and shockingly confusing ways. When you’re young, the impacts of losing a loved one are amplified by seeing the adults in your life in a new light. So when the person who kept it all together is gone, how are you supposed to move on? Forastera is Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’s debut feature, which explores the many ways life changes when death occurs.
The world is cruel in many ways to young girls, and there are few things worse than losing a grandma. The ones who taught family recipes, passed down their vintage fashion, or had their personalities rub off on their grandkids. Cata (Zoe Stein) is spending the summer with her sister Eva (Martina García), grandmother Catalina (Marta Angelat), and grandfather Tomeu (Lluís Homar) at their home in Mallorca, Spain. Their days are filled with good food, laughs, and an endless amount of love. Though all those memories make the loss of Catalina that much harder for this family to deal with.
Iglesias paints a beautiful portrait of this family in the small amount of time that they are together in their happiness. A matriarch of the family that, even into her elderly years, is still the head of the home. Cooking each meal with care and passing those traits to the girls who will someday lead their own families, if they choose. Both Cata and Eva see how a healthy relationship is supposed to be through seeing their grandparents together. It’s a poetic circle of life that is captured in such an intimate and real way that makes audiences idealize this tight-knit family. When they then have to suddenly live their lives without Catalina, that warmth is gone. Smiles have faded, and rooms, even when they are filled, don’t hold the same joy.
Cata and Eva are both in their early teenage years and still take immense happiness in being close to their grandma. It’s clear that they see her as the glue that keeps the house together, and they take in each moment and lesson she gives. Ultimately, when Cata finds her grandma dead outside on the stairs leading to her home, it’s a life-altering moment for her. Being the person to find a lifeless body is hard enough to deal with, let alone it being someone you love. It changes the entire dynamic of the family, but Cata has a hard time grieving. Telling her mother Pepa (Núria Prims) that she hasn’t cried about the loss, even when the sadness is overwhelming.
What Forastera does well that sets it apart from other coming-of-age films that deal with loss is that it shows the psychological changes that occur in strangely wholesome ways. Cata develops a coping mechanism that helps her deal with these complicated thoughts she’s having. It first appears when she is going through old clothing of her grandmother’s. This allows her to get to know her in ways that she didn’t know before. It might not be a conventional way of healing, especially when it delves into how Cata carries herself. Causing blurred lines between who she was before her grandmother passed and after.
There are numerous characters in Forastera that are dealing with this major loss other than Cata. Iglesias shows the loss of a partner and how it takes the light from Tomeu that once was blindingly bright. Mostly spending his days enjoying the company of friends and family as they play games or eat food cooked with Catalina’s love. After her death, he is shown looking distracted during conversations and gazing off into space. A once carefree man now gets irritated at the thought of selling his home. Both Cata and Tomeu are drawn to one another through their grief, and this is the most thoughtful portion of Iglesias’s film.
Visually, Forastera has a great sense of escapism through the lens of cinematographer Agnès Piqué Corbera. The film takes place on an island that I’ve only seen in postcards. Sunny rays peer in from the windows as Catalina and her granddaughters prepare sweet treats. And waves crash against one another on a patio with one chair empty next to Tomeu. Corbera uses reflections in water and mirrors to show the faces of grief that the family tries to hide from one another. Her work makes audiences feel like they are seeing moments that weren’t meant for our eyes, and paired with the intimate script, it makes Forastera one of the most tender films of the year.
As much as the film has strong emotional depth, there are parts of Cata that aren’t completely fleshed out. The coming-of-age aspect that starts strong through her blossoming freedom and new crush is stunted when her grandmother dies. There’s not much that audiences learn about Cata, or even Eva for that matter, outside of the grief they are experiencing that doesn’t allow them to feel like fully written characters. Stein has a star-making performance within Forastera that lets audiences get lost in her mind as she wanders through life.
For those seeking a sweetly unusual take on navigating grief, Iglesias’s debut is more than worth the watch. Its heartfelt approach to life’s most difficult aspects doesn’t judge how people grieve. Rather, it accepts the many ways grief shapes those who experience it with captivating performances and warm summer rays.
