As a teenage girl, hearing that you look like your grandmother is possibly not a compliment you wish to receive, but strangely it is, at least for Cata (Zoe Stein), the 17-year-old protagonist of Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ Forastera, world-premiering in Toronto’s Discovery section.

Cata is the embodiment of what people call “an old soul” – with her eyes calmly taking in the environment around a summer house in Mallorca, which is busier than usual, she keeps her chin up and only speaks when she has to. She has little to none of the typical teenage defiance, except maybe the beach dates she shares with a holidaying Swedish boy; most of the time, she is quiet and observant, her admiration directed not at her mother, Pepa (Núria Prim), but at her maternal grandmother, Catalina (Marta Angelat), in every scene the two share.

At first, Cata wears one of her grandmother’s dresses, then she smokes in secret, mimicking her gestures – it’s in those acts of imitation that one can see remembrance. Grief is always infantile in its voracious wish to keep the dead present in a tangible way, and what’s truly special about Forastera is that it zooms in on the mourning of a young girl, while simultaneously giving us snippets of the grieving of others – the mother, the sister, and even the grandad’s widower friend – as a constellation of sorrows. However, the writer-director doesn’t rush her characters as they process their loss, meaning that Cata’s doubling behaviour is not supposed to be immediately healing. In fact, the film allows space for doubt and pushback against her way of dealing with death, while never passing judgement on her nor on the impatient Pepa.

Forastera marks the feature debut by the Spanish director, but it has spent a long time in development. In 2020, Aleñar Iglesias presented a short film in the Cannes Critics’ Week, about a girl embracing the latent similarities she bears to her dead grandmother, with Stein in the lead. Its feature-length successor carries on the enigmatic pull of a plot where a young girl inhabits the role of her grandmother in a partly literal, partly spiritual way, while noticing the power she has over her grieving grandad, Tomeu (Lluís Homar). It’s a very tricky balance to maintain, but Aleñar Iglesias has what it takes, channelling the precious ambiguity of a childish perspective in ways reminiscent of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun [+leggi anche:
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Forastera is not just another sun-drenched summer holiday coming-of-age tale – its web of mysteries is so intricate that even when the plot uses incertitude to suggest a slightly disturbing shift (does the grandfather believe her to be his late wife?), the emotional complexity is convincing. A big part of this is thanks to Zoe Stein, who gives a remarkable performance, blending two characters that are one whole generation apart with admirable ease. Her Cata seems to exist in a state of flux between young and elderly, and perhaps this is the most truthful portrayal of a teenage girl possible, embodying a dichotomy for young women everywhere.

Forastera was produced by Spanish companies Lastor Media, La Perifèrica Produccions, Vilaüt Films and Presenta, in co-production with Fox in the Snow (Sweden) and Kino Produzioni (Italy). Alpha Violet oversees its international sales.