25/09/2025 - The Basque filmmakers admit they learned a great deal from this foray into the gay universe, while also putting topics like sexuality in later life and social backsliding on the table

(© Jorge Fuembuena/SSIFF)

Maspalomas [+see also:
film review
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interview: Aitor Arregi and José Mari …
film profile] was met with applause following its screening in Official Competition at the 73rd San Sebastián International Film Festival. At the helm, Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga, from Moriarti, answer our questions on the eve of the film’s Spanish release, on 26 September, via Bteam Pictures.

Cineuropa: Why choose the south of Gran Canaria rather than other famous Spanish gay destinations such as Sitges or Torremolinos?
José Mari Goenaga: The idea came to me when I visited Maspalomas for the first time, in 2016, and saw that microcosm of gay tourism which I thought could be portrayed in a film. At the same time, I read articles about LGTBI+ people going back into the closet when they moved into a care home. So I brought those two elements together in the screenplay. Maspalomas also interested us for its physicality, with those dunes, starting our story as if on a lunar or Martian landscape… where naked men suddenly appear. Plus, the climate is good year-round and people retire there. I even joke that this could become a trilogy if we also shoot in Sitges and Torremolinos.

How did you approach the shoot, with the action set in the Canaries and in San Sebastián?
Aitor Arregi: We wanted to create a contrast between the two places. We needed to jump from Maspalomas’s epic beauty and freshness to the confinement of the care home in the Basque Country. We decided to do it with more vivid colours that transport you to another world, evoking Maspalomas from San Sebastián, because we always stay close to the character: we tend to stage our directing choices based on what the protagonist is feeling. In the Canaries we were after a slightly documentary feel, while in the care home we show his absolute low, conveying to the viewer what Vicente, the protagonist, is going through.

What happens in that care home recalls your film The Endless Trench [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño an…
film profile], which could also be read through a queer lens.
J.M.G.: Yes, the two films are connected. That feature, aside from reconstructing Spain’s history, was a metaphor for the closet: the fear of coming out, of showing yourself… In fact, there was a gay postman who had a conversation with Antonio de la Torre, and you can hear that, in voice-over, in Maspalomas when Vicente goes to the cinema. It might seem navel-gazing, but that wink makes sense.

You address sexuality in later life, and reclaim it.
A.A.: It’s a very common cliché to think that when you’re old you no longer feel sexual desire. What I loved in José Mari’s script is that this man goes back into the closet, and also this—there’s a very interesting debate here. Even in care homes there are people who seek each other out like instinct-driven animals and have to be separated. That, which appears in Maspalomas, is based on a real case and it’s very powerful.

J.M.G.: Even though I wrote the script—after researching and speaking with older people—folks still question it so much that you start to doubt yourself. We had already tackled a lesbian romance in En 80 días [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. It has become established in this society that it’s preferable to think older people don’t have sex.

You go further still, showing young people attracted to older people.
J.M.G.: It’s something you see in Maspalomas. But there are so many prejudices and preconceived ideas… It seems unusual for a young person to be interested in a mature person; it doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen.

A.A.: For me, learning all this was like doing a Master’s. How simplistic we are when we haven’t experienced something! In Maspalomas I saw an immense spectrum of different characters. And when you tell people about it, they’re blown away.

J.M.G.: The film also speaks to society’s tendency to homogenise: unless you say otherwise, you’re presumed heterosexual, and from a certain age, sexless. It’s up to you to say you’re different.

Are we reaching a grim moment of social regression?
J.M.G.: Maspalomas stems from a reflection we wouldn’t even have considered 15 years ago: the risk of losing what’s been won and rolling back rights. What happens to Vicente is exactly that, but from a more intimate, personal angle: a loss and a setback imposed by a context that exerts structural violence. So we’ll have to keep fighting for it.

A.A.: Being optimistic, I don’t think the rollback is as large as the progress we’ve made. We’re not going back to 1975, to that giant closet.

(Translated from Spanish)