Forastera
TL;DR: A 97-minute debut feature about a teenager who begins impersonating her dead grandmother. Premieres at Film Forum in New York on May 29, 2026. Shot in Catalan on location in Mallorca. Won the FIPRESCI Prize at Toronto 2025. If Aftersun or Petite Maman stuck with you, this will too.
The premise: A girl becomes her grandmother
Cata's summer in Mallorca is supposed to be ordinary. Then her grandmother dies—suddenly, absurdly, and only Cata sees it happen.
What happens next isn't grief as we recognize it. No tears. No family conversations about loss. Instead, Cata starts wearing her grandmother's clothes. She adopts her posture. She slips into her domestic role. The family's entire unspoken hierarchy—who defers to whom at dinner, who holds the room, who speaks first—begins to invert. And nobody knows how to stop it. Nobody quite wants to.
Writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias doesn't reach for supernatural explanation here. There's no twist waiting. The entire film holds itself inside a single, sustained contradiction: a child grieving by becoming the person she's lost, and a family that finds this both unbearable and necessary. That's the ghost story. No machinery required.
Why Forastera stands out
The thing nobody mentions often enough about films like this is how much they depend on restraint. Restraint is rarer than it sounds.
What strikes me most is the film's commitment to specificity. Iglesias shot primarily in Catalan—a language Spain's mainstream cinema routinely sidelines—with Spanish and English woven through. That's not a regional detail. It's a deliberate refusal of the widest possible audience. And in cinema, that's usually where the real feeling lives. Film Threat awarded the film a perfect 10/10, calling it "quiet, powerful, and elegant," with Zoe Stein's performance singled out as a genuine breakout.
The cast is lean. Stein carries the film as Cata, opposite Lluís Homar, Núria Prims, and Marta Angelat—a tight ensemble that makes the household feel lived-in rather than staged. The Mallorcan landscape (shot around Alcúdia and Pollença) isn't just backdrop; that particular warm, heavy light becomes part of the emotional texture.
According to ICS Film's Toronto coverage, the film operates as "an unexpectedly tender ghost story." Tender is exactly right. The film doesn't punish its characters for their strangeness. Cata's impersonation isn't presented as pathological. It's presented as the only language available to her. That kind of compassion for behavior that looks deeply odd from the outside—that's harder to pull off than it sounds.
How it came together: Festival run and distribution
Forastera is a co-production spanning Lastor Media, Vilaüt Films, La Perifèrica, and Fox in the Snow Films—the kind of multinational commitment that signals something other than commercial calculation. Iglesias developed the feature from her own 2020 short of the same name, which had already established her interest in how families fracture and quietly reconstitute themselves under pressure.
The film premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. That's not minor. The FIPRESCI jury at TIFF identifies films the mainstream awards circuit hasn't caught up with yet.
Grasshopper Film acquired U.S. distribution rights. The film opens theatrically at Film Forum in New York on May 29, 2026, with wider distribution to follow. Hard to say if a formal awards campaign is planned, but the festival pedigree alone should generate serious attention. Movie OTT tracks emerging international releases across festival circuits, and Forastera ranks among the most discussed debut features from TIFF in recent memory.
Where to watch and what you need to know
Release date: May 29, 2026 (Film Forum, New York)
Runtime: 97 minutes
Language: Primarily Catalan, with Spanish and English
Director: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias (debut feature)
Cast: Zoe Stein, Lluís Homar, Núria Prims, Marta Angelat
The film is available on major streaming platforms—check the where-to-watch widget at the top of this page for current availability, which shifts as distribution deals finalize. Movie OTT's streaming tracker updates automatically when Forastera lands on a new service, so you don't have to check each platform individually.
Theatrical screenings will expand beyond New York in the months following the May 29 premiere at Film Forum.
Is it for you?
Watch Forastera if you've responded to Aftersun or Petite Maman—films that sit with ambiguity and let a single, haunting image carry the emotional weight without explaining it away. It's the kind of film that doesn't announce itself and then refuses to leave you alone.
Don't watch it if you need resolution. The film never tells you whether what Cata is doing is healthy, necessary, or some combination of both. It just shows you a girl moving through her grandmother's house wearing her grandmother's life—and trusts you to feel what that means.