TIFF 50: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias wins the FIPRESCI Prize for "Forastera"

by Cláudio Alves

Light has character. In Lucía Aleñar Iglesias's feature debut, Forastera, it also has a soul, manifesting spirits intangible and far away. Through variable brightness and mysterious movements, it bridges times and places, the here and there, our commonplace existence and something that might not be the beyond but is closer to such abstractions than to matters of the flesh. You can feel it in your bones, even before a sage old woman looks at a flickering light and describes its inconsistency as proof of ghosts roaming around the house. It's right there, at the film's start, when Iglesias sets her camera on two sisters sunbathing during their Mallorcan vacation.

The eldest shares the tall tale of a dolphin sighting, daring the other girl to doubt her. As they talk, clouds pass over and the temperature of the tableau shifts from warmth to cold grey and back again. They flicker like the faint impression of a candle flame, a picture of serenity volatized. More than just its subject, the frame itself feels animated by an impossible life…

Our storyteller is Cata, who's enjoying an annual summer holiday at her grandparents' house in the Catalan region of Spain. Along with her sister, she spends her time in shapeless days as befits the season, meandering between noncommittal communion with her family and the idle pleasures of a seaside Eden. The threat of torpor is ever-present, as is the fate of many a summertime musing, but both Iglesias and her protagonist find their way around it. They do it through these stories, lies and a play on identity that's borderline Bergmanian, with Cata assuming the role of her namesake, grandma Catalina, during phone calls and other such scenarios.

Iglesias, in particular, avoids cliché through formal rigor, privileging master shots framed around the house's geometry and palettes predicated on the contrast between the whispered pastels of domestic interiors and the emerald turquoise expanse of the Mediterranean outside. Long takes also make an appearance, often used to linger on the uncomfortable pauses of conversations or the way people negotiate touch, the space between them. Once, she even has Cata and a cute boy she met on the beach talk as they swim, staging the scene from below so that we don't see their faces and can only appreciate the contrast in the submerged bodies, their movement, their tentative closeness. 

These prolonged spaces between cuts allow the camera and its audience to consider that magical light, how it's transformed by time and other variations, and what feelings it can unleash. Notice how DP Agnès Piqué captures the differences between the organic metamorphosis of daylight into night and the manmade machinery of malfunctioning lamps, warm sodium and abatjour-veiled pink against halogen white. Something as simple as the fluttering of curtains in the salty breeze can change the mood of a scene, evoking an otherwise invisible presence in the family abode. Equal parts eerie and comforting, these luminescent hauntings are especially strong in the aftermath of Catalina's death. 

Her passing is a shock that reverberates through the clan and even brings the girls' mother, Pepa, back home to sort the funeral, maybe divide inheritances, prepare her father for the lonely life of a widower. For his part, he latches onto the granddaughter as a conduit into what he lost and can't retrieve, pulling Cata's impersonating games into an uncomfortable place carved by their shared grief, the pick of nostalgia, the hammer of remembrance. She, too, seems possessed, borrowing from Catalina's closet and recipe book, filling an absence that shouldn't be hers to fill, taking on a role that's not hers to play.

Some filmmakers might have taken this premise toward some shocking prurience, but Iglesias and company remain restrained. That's not to suggest the characters don't recognize that possibility. Delivering the film's strongest performance, Núria Prims has Pepa cut through the metaphysical oddities with a necessary dose of reason that contrasts with the sad diffuseness of Lluís Homar's patriarch. Their father-daughter bond is formed by these opposite movements, a clash. On the other hand, his dynamic with Zoe Stein's Cata resembles dancing in and out of a liminal space, identities bleeding together one minute and separating like water and oil the next.

In that regard, they reflect Iglesias' linguistic switches between English, Castilian, and Catalan, as well as the transformations scenes undergo under formal devices. At some junctures, one can almost pinpoint Catalina looking over the living, her watch surging in the transitions, in the sounds that travel disembodied, the tonal twisting that comes with text and light and performance. There are passages where this presence is so intense as to defy our understanding of the border between Cata and Catalina. Indeed, Stein often seems surer of herself when channeling the grandmother's spirit than the girl whose mourning has made her a vessel.

It's a consequence of Cata's somewhat unreachable nature, so defined by her part in Forastera's visions of psychological, spiritual, material and immaterial loss that she risks becoming a non-character. She's a hollow center that struggles to hold her narrative together. And I don't doubt this is deliberate since nothing in Lucía Aleñar Iglesias's film seems incidental or left to chance, not even the elliptical reticence of its ending, catharsis denied and coming-of-age arc prolonged beyond the narrative's frame. All in all, it's a remarkably controlled debut whose relative fragilities are the result of risky decisions that deserve respect even when they don't quite work. Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, Forastera also deserves its fair share of applause.

Forastera had its world premiere at TIFF 50, part of the Discovery section. The FIPRESCI jury at the fest rewarded Lucía Aleñar Iglesias with its highest honor.