The Goya They are a fracticide fight to take the awards to the best films in Spanish of the year (and a few in languages of the European territory). And as you know, there are always discussions about whether or not the winners deserved the awards. We come, as always, with very personal opinions, but that can help you dissipate doubts if this weekend, to accompany Saturday night’s gala, you want to see some goyizable or goyized cinema. These are our three favorite films among all the nominees (we leave out the best European film), and where to see them.
House in flames
There is nothing more to see the vast majority of nominations that this black and bitter comedy accumulates to guess where its strengths are: in its cast and its script. Everything to form the portrait of a very specific fauna, a certain decadent Catalan bourgeoisie, headed by two first actors, Alberto San Juan and Emma Vilarasau.
Both are a mature and divorced couple who (more or less) have rebuilt their lives and remain in a house that the family has on the Costa Brava with their children to make a series of important decisions. From the first measures of the film, where the mother has to make a sperpetic decision so that the meeting is held. The theme of the film is clear: a ruthless but hilarious portrait of the most daily human miseries.
Nominated a Best film, best leading actor (Alberto San Juan), best leading actress (Emma Vilarasau), best cast actor (Enric auquer), best cast actress (two: Macarena García and María Rodríguez Soto ‘), best original script, better Production Directorate
Where to see it: In Netflix
The infiltrated
‘La Infiltrada’ has already made history becoming the highest grossing Spanish film in the story directed for a woman, but her real value is in the stark portrait of a wild era that makes through the figure of Elena Tejada, Rioja agent of The National Police that with 22 years changes identity to infiltrate ETA and dismantle the Donosti command in the late nineties. A real story that, as the director Arantxa Echevarría says, dismantles the myth that women can only tell small and intimate stories.
Because ‘the infiltrated’ is, above all, a thriller of good and bad, not a political drama attentive to the nuances, and in that sense it works overwhelmingly: its recreation of the Donosti of the nineties, the extraordinary interpretation of Carolina Yuste, The increasingly suffocating and more urgent rhythm in anguish pies. A first thriller.
Nominated a Best film, best direction, best original script, best original music, best leading actress (Carolina Yuste), best cast actress (Nausicaa Bonnín), best cast actor (Luis Tosar), best production direction, best photography direction, Better assembly, better makeup and hairdressing, better sound, better special effects
Where to see it: In cinemas
The crying
Only its director Pedro Martín-Calero took a nomination, but it is worth claiming this film, right now that he has just landed in Prime Video. It is a piece of supernatural terror that comes with an indicutable quality seal: the script is co-written by Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña, a regular collaborator of Rodrigo Sorogoyen and co-managing of gender films as shuddering as ‘As Bestas’.
Here a splendid Ester Expósito gives life to a girl who feels threatened by a presence that is not perceived with the naked eye. We will know a story that occurred twenty years ago, ten thousand kilometers, and how this entity crosses the time and space to sift over several women. Using as a starting point the ominous style of Japanese ghost cinema, Martín-Calero and Peña draw an invisible line that tells the fear of three women in a story of pure terror, but who has easily extrapolable meanings to much more tangible threats.
Where to see it: In Prime Video
Nominated a Best novel address