ASHES (CENIZA EN LA BOCA) Special Screenings

Multi-hyphenate director/producer/actor Diego Luna adapts Mexican writer Brenda Navarro’s acclaimed novel for his Cannes-premiered fourth feature, a powerful and unconventional immigration drama about a young Mexican woman who journeys to Spain with her younger brother to join the mother who left them behind as children. At 21, Lucila (Anna Díaz) is already accustomed to carrying responsibilities beyond her years. When she leaves Mexico with her emotionally delicate brother Diego (Sergio Bautista) to join their mother, Isabel (Adriana Paz), in Madrid, the journey promises a chance to begin again. But Spain does not provide the fresh start she imagined. Struggling to make ends meet, Lucila undertakes difficult and precarious work as a nanny and caregiver, and, despite the embrace of a loving community of fellow immigrants, she finds herself a perpetual outsider. At home, buried resentments resurface as Lucila and Diego confront the emotional distance created by the years they spent away from their mother, who is still reconciling the hopes she had for her family with the harsh reality she met in Spain. As the boundaries between Lucila’s desire for independence and her roles as daughter, sister and caretaker begin to collapse, a tragic event prompts her to return to her grandparents in Mexico. Now an outsider in her own hometown, Lucila sees the past through altered eyes, reckoning with the choices her mother made long before she could understand them. Díaz brings a striking combination of toughness and vulnerability to Lucila. Her performance anchors a rich and nuanced film about displacement and identity, which also touches on universal issues of growing up, letting go and making peace with the past in order to carve a path into the future. –Abbie Algar