08/01/2026 - The film by Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga portrays a late-life homecoming to a place that isn’t home

This article was written as part of the Lab of Creative, Cultural and Festival Journalism held within the Les Arcs Film Festival and organised by the MIOB festival network. This network includes Crossing Europe Filmfestival Linz (AT), Festival de Sevilla (ES), European Film Festival Palić (RS), Les Arcs European Film Festival (FR), Scanorama European Film Forum (LT), Trieste Film Festival (IT) and the FilmFestival Cottbus (DE). With the support of the Creative Europe - MEDIA programme, this project provides cinema journalism training for students and recent graduates. The next edition of the Lab will take place in the Trieste Film Festival between 20 and 24 January.

Directors Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga reunite to present a deceptively simple juxtaposition: the safety of a particular place versus the inescapable nature of time. Rather than being a memento mori story, Maspalomas [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Aitor Arregi and José Mari …
film profile] is a memento senectutis, reminding us to acknowledge old age, especially in gay circles where youth is often treated as the only currency that counts.

Maspalomas follows Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz), a 76-year-old gay man living a carefree, sunlit existence in Maspalomas in the Canary Islands. Having recently separated from his partner of fifty years, Vicente moves through the resort town with a buoyancy that reads less like denial and more like a decision, as if joy is something he actively chooses, minute by minute. When circumstances force him to return to San Sebastián, he moves into a nursing home and begins the quieter and harsher process of reconciling the life he has built with the life he can still live. Along the way, he reconnects with his daughter Nerea (Nagore Aranburu), and the narrative subsequently becomes more intergenerational and more complicated than a straightforward late-life reinvention story.

One of the film’s quiet achievements is what it refuses. It’s a rare enough thing for queer cinema to cast older gay men as protagonists rather than punchlines, ghosts or cautionary figures. Maspalomas goes even further by challenging the stereotype of the older gay man as being secure, comfortably partnered and financially insulated. Vicente isn’t destitute, but he’s not safe from precariousness either. His independence is rough edged, and the script doesn’t sand those edges down for the sake of an inspiring story.

Set in Maspalomas, the first act is where the story courts pleasure most openly, and it does so with a frankness that feels observed rather than designed to shock. Vicente cruises on a beach, takes part in Pride parades, goes to raves and drifts through sex parties. The film’s explicitness is part of its authenticity rather than a provocation. Arregi and Goenaga treat these spaces as social ecosystems rather than mere set dressings, allowing Vicente to belong to them without apology or without being reduced to a symbol.

Soroiz’s performance is the anchor here. It’s disarming for its lack of defensiveness. You can feel, in the looseness of Vicente’s face and the ease of his smile, the relief of a man who has spent the first quarter of his life closeted and who’s determined not to waste the time that remains. Vicente’s delight isn’t naïve, it’s informed. His expressions suggest someone who’s acutely aware of time but grateful anyway. Soroiz doesn’t make grand statements about freedom or self-acceptance. He renders them unnecessary. In his hands, sentiments which could easily become platitudes are given the weight and texture of something actually experienced, becoming hard-won truths.

Vicente shares this Maspalomas life with his best friend, Ramón (Zorion Eguileor), who helps him out after his breakup since his ex had supported him financially. This detail matters because it grounds any hedonism in logistics and dependency – the kinds of arrangements people rarely admit to out loud. Their friendship is intimate without being romanticised. The script resists the obvious temptation to treat male intimacy as either a punchline or a twist, whilst also avoiding the performative sentimentality of films such as The Bucket List. Here, a bond isn’t a lesson, it’s quite simply a fact of survival.

When Vicente relocates to San Sebastián, the mood shifts decisively. Javi Aguirre Erauso’s camera settles into a cooler, greyer tone after the warmth and saturated colours of Maspalomas. The change isn’t just aesthetic, it’s social too. In the nursing home, Vicente must negotiate his sexuality in a quietly conservative environment where older queer people often feel pressured to retreat into a kind of safety through invisibility. The irony is sharp. Vicente once escaped this very demographic to find refuge, but now he’s forced to live within it again, with all its stubbornness and unexamined prejudice.

His roommate Xanti (Kandido Uranga) embodies that hostility – he’s homophobic, among other biases – and the story doesn’t pretend that such attitudes are uncommon. Still, the dynamic between the two men is more interesting than a straightforward villain narrative. There’s friction and begrudging proximity, and there are moments which suggest change is possible, even if only partial and messy. At times, the nursing home is portrayed with such tenderness that it verges on idealisation, especially in an era when public conversations about elderly care tend to focus on neglect, understaffing and abuse. The focus here is less on institutional critiquing than on the possibility of dignity.

Maspalomas also incorporates the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is the one element which risks bogging the whole thing down. While the pandemic adds thematic weight, it also flattens the rhythm, pulling the focus away from Vicente’s personal reckoning and towards a broader historical marker. We sense that parts of the script were devised earlier and that the pandemic was added later, making the combination of the two feel slightly uneven.

Where the film regains its sharpness is in its portrayal of gay life today. It meditates on the evolution of queer spaces, from bars that once served as hiding places and communal sanctuaries to the apps that have replaced them, restructuring desire into something closer to instant judgment – the rapid scrutiny of faces, ages and bodies. In this context, Maspalomas turns out to be a paradise but also a compromise of sorts. A haven, yes, but also – as Vicente remarks – a city-sized closet. A place where being out is easy because the environment has been designed around a particular kind of outness.

It’s this very ambivalence that gives the film its bite. It’s warm and even celebratory, but it doesn’t downplay the cost of safety. It asks what it means to build a life in a place that protects you, and what happens when time forces you back to places where protection is lacking. It does so through a performance which makes gratitude feel less like a slogan and more like an actual practice: Vicente performs in this way for himself, not for others, as a way of staying connected to his own life.