Mallorca. Teenager Cata (Zoe Stein) is soaking up the sun, smoking furtive cigarettes, and enjoying a summer break with her grandparents and her younger sis. That is, until Cata’s beloved abuela Catalina suffers a fatal collapse. The girls’ mom rushes over to take charge, but their grandfather is distraught, finding solace only in Cata’s uncanny resemblance to her namesake.
Lucia Aleñar Iglesias’s debut feature is a coming of age drama, but also something more, with its sensitivity to such subjects as old age, death, and family dynamics across three generations. It even flirts with becoming a ghost story. Newcomer Zoe Stein is extraordinary as the young girl who feels herself in a strange way becoming her grandmother.
Cleverly playing with taboo, Iglesias’s debut proves an insightful, captivating look into the darker corners of grief through the familiar lens of a coming-of-age narrative.
Rafa Sales Ross, Variety
Quiet, pwerful and elegant… Forastera possesses a poetic, lyrical quality… Zoe Stein is a revelation… [she] should become a household name for this performance, and if she can keep up this level of acting, she will be a huge star sooner rather than later.
Bobby LePire, Film Threat
Director Aleñar Iglesias and the chameleonic Stein introducing themselves as ones to watch, if not outright revelatory talents from the word go.
Will Bjarnar, Next Best Picture
Lucía Aleñar Iglesias
Zoe Stein, Lluís Homar, Núria Prims, Nonni Ardal, Martina García
Spain/Italy/Sweden
2025
In Catalan, English and Spanish with English subtitles
FIPRESCI prize for Emerging Filmmakers, TIFF
Book Tickets
Saturday January 10
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
Lucía Aleñar Iglesias
Cinematography
Agnès Piqué
Editor
Paola Freddi
Original Music
Anna von Hausswolff, Filip Leyman
Production Design
Gala Seguí
Also in This Series
This year’s New Spanish Cinema is packed with an exceptionally strong line-up — award-winning cinema, an Opening Gala featuring tapas and wine, and a flamenco-inspired VIFF Live.
The Blue Star
In crisis, a popular singer quits Spain to backpack in Argentina. There he comes under the spell of a veteran musician, who teaches him the art of chacareras, zambas and vidalas. It's a journey of musical kinship and spiritual reawakening.
Forastera
In this mysterious and subtle coming of age drama, teenager Cata is soaking up the sun, smoking furtive cigarettes, and enjoying a summer break with her grandparents and her younger sis in Mallorca. That is, until Cata's beloved abuela collapses...
Afternoons of Solitude
Pacification director Albert Serra turns his unflinching gaze on the subject of bullfighting, and in particular the famous young matador Andrés Roca Rey. The film challenges us to look its subject square in the eye and draw our own conclusions.
The Executioner
Regularly cited as the greatest Spanish film ever made, Berlanga's masterpiece is a pitch black comedy about an undertaker lined up by the state executioner to marry his beautiful daughter -- but he'll also have to inherit the old man's job.
The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés + Por Derecho (On Their Own Right) Live
Winner of the Goya Award for Best Documentary, this is an exquisite and surprisingly intimate portrait of the brilliant young guitarist Yerai Cortés, preceded by an hour of passionate flamenco music, song and dance performed by Por Derecho.
Saturn Return
This fascinating, highly acclaimed movie is a thinly disguised history of 90s indie rockers Los Planetas, a Granada grunge outfit who cited the Velvet Underground as inspiration. It's one of the best rock movies in years.
8
The always stylish, idiosyncratic Basque auteur Julio Medem is back with one of his most ambitious films (and our closing night gala), a sweeping historical romance in eight chapters, spanning eight decades in Spanish history from the 1930s to the present day.