TIFF25: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias Talks Grief, Ghosts, & Memory in Forastera
This interview was originally published on Film Obsessive.
Five years ago, Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ short film, Forastera, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. You may remember that five years ago, things looked a little different because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Iglesias wasn’t able to wholly celebrate the festival run of her short film, but that short film has now been developed into a feature film with the same name and it had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Mere hours before the premiere, Iglesias sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss the journey from short to feature, her relationship with the idea of being a stranger, and how more stories are ghost stories than we realize.
The original short film was always intended to be a proof of concept for the story of Forastera. The film follows a young girl, Cata (Zoe Stein), and her sister (Martina García) who are spending the summer with their grandparents in Mallorca. The hazy days of summer are interrupted by the unexpected death of their grandmother (Marta Angelat). In Cata’s grief, she begins to pick up the mannerisms and clothing of her grandmother.
courtesy of TIFF
“I always thought I wanted to make a feature out of this,” Iglesias starts. “I think the nature of shorts only lets you dig to a certain point. I love what I did with the short, the tone and the world we created. I wanted to preserve that root and be able to expand from there, because I think there’s a lot more to the character’s journey that I wanted to explore. I certainly didn’t want to make the same thing twice.”
One of the biggest changes from short to feature was in the character of Cata. She is who the audience spends the most time with and who may or may not be possessed by the ghost of her grandmother.
“I wanted to work on changing the character a little bit. To empower her in some ways. In the short, she’s compared to her grandmother and in the feature, I wanted to see that projection, but also to explore her own curiosity.”
“I also wanted to expand the family. I think the grandfather has a pretty different role from the short to the feature,” continues Iglesias. “In the short, you’re not quite sure whether he’s aware of what’s going on. One thing I really wanted to change and to dig into was, yeah, this person is fully aware of what he’s doing and the choice that he’s making by going on this journey with his granddaughter.”
“There’s also the character of the mother who doesn’t really appear much to start. I wanted to look at her return home and how charged that can be to come to this place that is full of good and difficult memories and to be grieving someone you didn’t get to say goodbye to.”
Forastera literally means “stranger,” but in Mallorca, it’s used to describe foreigners who come for a vacation. There’s a clear separation between the locals and the visitors, but Cata and her sister exist in a strange in between. They don’t live there, but their grandparents do, so they know the real Mallorca. At the end of the day, though, they are visitors. It’s this dueling identity that Iglesias explores in the film in a myriad of ways.
courtesy of TIFF
“There’s a sort of nostalgic quality to the short that I think is still there in the feature. Visually, we worked on creating this world that felt idyllic, but also haunted in a way. There’s a kind of postcard, artificial quality to the image that I think works with the themes of the film of performance and of pretending to be someone you’re not.”
“I wanted to portray this place from that point of view. Of someone who’s there intermittently, who is passing through the sort of heavily tourist places, but also through the more local customs,” explains Iglesias. “Not really integrating, but having this view from the outside of things.”
For those who don’t speak Spanish or Catalan, the subtle changes between languages may go unnoticed throughout the film. However, these changes are an added layer to this push and pull Iglesias is describing.
“It was a very natural decision to have those language switches in the film because of how I grew up. I spent my summers in Mallorca and I heard these languages at home all the time. It’s such a touristy place that you hear German, Swedish, English, all the time. I found it to be a very interesting narrative tool because I think for people who speak more than one language, it’s a way of sort of code switching, if that makes sense.”
courtesy of TIFF
“I think we’re not quite the same person when we’re speaking English or when we’re speaking Spanish or Catalan,” describes Iglesias. “That may be from the level of proficiency you have, but also who you’re talking to, right? It felt like a really interesting way for the character of Cata to distinguish who she was at what point and to form new relationships. If you have an existing relationship with your grandfather that’s in Spanish, to suddenly adopt a new language creates new meaning, right?”
Visually, the film is inherently striking because of its location, but another image that stands out is the dress Cata finds in her grandmother’s closet. It’s a white dress with red polka dots that’s vintage, but also modern. In the short film, the dress was more classic and feminine. In the feature, it became something with more weight to it.
“We didn’t want it to be too out there, but we wanted it to be very attractive to this young girl who suddenly lost this person that she obviously loved, but was sort of a secondary character in her life,” says Iglesias. “There’s this new curiosity to get to know her and so we built this closet that felt like this woman has had many lives before she was a grandmother.”
“I wanted the dress to have a retro ’70s quality to it, but it’s also very empowered because it’s actually a romper, it’s pants. It’s very subtle, but they’re pants just to give her a little bit of a modern distinction. The initial inspiration for me for a lot of this film was this idea of optical illusions and something that appears like something else. Seeing two people in one, that kind of thing.”
While not credited on the film’s IMDB page, the house is a character in its own right in the film. It’s a beautiful home that sits atop a hill with a view of the sea. Much of the film takes place within the confines of this house and the audience feels the weight of all of the memories that happened here before the film even began.
“The house is the container for this girl’s imagination and this girl’s journey,” explains Iglesias. “I was really interested in finding a place that was in front of the sea that had that sort of vastness to look at, but that also felt sort of claustrophobic and disorienting. I wanted to find a place that had hidden corners and hallways. That was actually kind of hard because most of the houses on the coast on that island are fishermen homes, which are really small without many places to hide.”
courtesy of TIFF
Throughout the film, the characters are shot framed in doorways, frames within a frame. For Iglesias, these frames were essential to creating the claustrophobic feelings necessary for the film. She compares these frames within a frame to the child’s toy Polly Pocket.
“She’s sort of playing pretend. Like a Polly Pocket playing family, right? To enclose them in these doors and these rooms with the camera on the outside creates this presence. Who’s watching? Who else is here? That helps accompany the ghostly elements of the film, which are there in a very casual way, but it all ties them together in that way.”
“Pretty early on, I realized that, for me, the ghost is a necessary creation for those who want to see it and those who don’t need it are oblivious to it in a way. I wanted to treat it that way for the audience as well. It’s there, but we’re not emphasizing too much on it. It’s just there for the characters who really need to feel that presence.”
Like adolescent summers, Forastera is made up of a series of moments. Scenes don’t always come immediately after what preceded it. Sometimes, there are hour or full day gaps in between. It’s a narrative choice that returns to Iglesias’ exploration of memory. How the little things tend to stick with us even in times of massive upheaval. As the writer as well, Iglesias had to determine which moments of Cata’s summer were essential to tell her story.
“It’s so hard,” laughs Iglesias. “It’s such a process. I tried to be as intuitive as possible with the rhythm of the film. The way I decided what scenes to include was to find the moments that felt really climactic in that way, or that had this like turning point for the characters. What are those details and how do they maybe come back in a new way?”
courtesy of TIFF
“For example, with the card game where we meet this cast of characters and Cata playing tricks. In the end, we sort of return to this game. How has she changed?” muses Iglesias. “At the same time, we’re in a house during the holidays. You’re sort of doing the same thing every day, right? There’s not that many adventures to get in way.”
“One of the things I wanted to include in the structure was how, when you go through something like this, it’s such a tragic loss that you don’t expect. There’s a sensation of time stopping or like stretching for these characters and a meaninglessness. It’s impossible to move on, right? I wanted to find a way to show that through these very long takes and very stretched out scenes where it’s slow zooms that are slowly focusing you in.”
As the film unfolds, the concept of a stranger morphs. It’s subtle and doesn’t call attention to itself, but the audience is forced to reckon with the idea of what it means to be a stranger or a foreigner. In adapting her short into a feature, Iglesias’ own understanding of the word changed.
“When I first thought of that title, it had the connotation that the islanders use. As I was writing it, this idea of not feeling at home with yourself or trying to find who you are when something so earth shattering happens took on a new meeting for me.”
“But also, personally, I wrote this film living in the U.S., very far from home. I think, without getting too introspective, I definitely think that I wouldn’t have written this if I wasn’t so far away and was thinking of what it’s like to return home and sort of the beautiful, but very mixed feelings you get when you’ve been far away for so long and returning. The complicated feelings of belonging that co-exist there.”
Support Your Local Film Critic!
~
Support Your Local Film Critic! ~
Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, YouTube, & Facebook. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.