Malaga Festival 2026 Day 1

The Malaga Festival begins its 29th edition (March 6-15), consolidating itself as the epicenter of Spanish and Latin American cinema with 22 feature films in competition in the Official Section. We start with the inaugural “Calle Málaga” by Maryam Touzani with Carmen Maura, the satire “Altascapabilities” by Víctor García León, the Argentine experimentation of “Los Nadadores” by Sol Iglesias SK in Zonazine and the emotional “Corredora” by Laura García Alonso about mental health in elite sports.

CALLE MÁLAGA (Maryam Touzani, 2025)

María Ángeles, an almost eighty-year-old Spanish woman who lives alone on Málaga Street in Tangier, sees her world shake when her daughter arrives from Madrid determined to sell her lifelong apartment. Clinging to her home and her memories, she will fight to recover her house and her objects while, against all odds, she rediscovers love, desire and a new way of belonging.

You can forgive her for having extra minutes here and there because it is a pleasure to see Carmen Maura give life to a human and imperfect character. After The blue caftan Maryam Touzani gives a new example of observation skills to realities hidden in plain sight. Your mother is going to love it, recommend it to her.

HIGH CAPACITIES (Victor García León, 2026)

Alicia and Gonzalo, a middle-class couple, get their son Fer to enter an elitist secular school where the tempting door to high society opens before them. While they are dazzled by new privileges and contacts, their ambitions and fears challenge the moral principles and certainties on which they believed they had built their lives.

Juan Diego Botto is one of the best comedy actors in Spanish cinema precisely because he doesn't try to be funny. The García León-Cobeaga duo hits the nail on the head, as always, in their portrait of an aspirational Spain without losing sight of the fact that they are people like you and me. I am sure that we will not be able to say the same about the portrait of the two Spains that is coming up next week.

THE SWIMMERS (Sol Iglesias SK, 2026)

It is day 368 of an endless summer in an apocalyptic Buenos Aires, where night has not come for three days. Between extreme heat, power outages and mass exodus, a group of friends invade empty mansions to swim in their pools, but this improvised paradise soon transforms into a delirious hell.

A hodgepodge, for good, of themes (ecology, isolation, class consciousness, national crisis…) illustrated by bodies that drown and get dirty in an apocalyptic Buenos Aires. “The Swimmers” is everything I ask of ZonaZine: daring, imperfection, risk, youth, that is, a film that is unlike any other and at the same time is clear about its references (although the director avoided them in the presentation).

RUNNER (Laura García Alonso, 2026)

Cris, an elite runner, suffers a psychotic break that forces her to move away from high competition and face an unknown reality. Not everyone around her will know how to help her, but her sister Natalia becomes her key refuge to accept her condition and redefine her pace of life.

Portraits of mental health can sometimes remain a cold catalog of symptoms taken from Wikipedia. “Corredora” dodges that bullet well and creates a character as problematic as she is full of empathy. Furthermore, it ends at just the right moment to leave a good taste in your mouth and not explain more than necessary.