Women’s Film Festival Madrid Opens With Mexico Focus and Chicas Tristes, Digi Mart USA News (Madrid, Spain): The Women’s Film Festival Madrid, which runs throughout this week, is holding its ninth edition with the goal of highlighting the ways women position themselves behind the camera and showing their growth in the film industry. The festival features 70 Spanish and international feature films from countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Spain, the United States, France, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Sweden, Tunisia, and Mexico, which is this year’s guest country.
Chicas Tristes, the first feature film by young filmmaker Fernanda Tovar, opened this year’s Focus México 2026 program, organized with La Fundación Casa de México en España and the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos en España of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM-España). The screening took place at the Academy of Cinema, one of 18 venues participating in the festival.
The film follows two friends, Paula and La Maestra, played by Darana Álvarez and Rocío Guzmán, who share a swimming club. Their friendship is shaken after an incident related to the loss of one character’s virginity, raising the question of whether she truly wanted it.
Tovar, who spent eight years developing the project, said the story explores consent, friendship, empathy, and disagreements among women, and that the story is not autobiographical but draws on reflections about experiences that could happen to anyone.
Tovar is part of Colectivo Colmena, an independent production collective based in Mexico City for ten years, whose members rotate roles across one another’s films and share feedback on scripts and cuts. The film has won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlinale and the Jury Prize at the Cartagena Film Festival, and has received six nominations at festivals including Cannes, Tribeca, and the San Sebastián International Film Festival.
Estrella Araiza, director of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FIGC), also appears at Focus México 2026. She has led the festival since 2018, and the festival, which began as the Muestra de Cine Mexicano en Guadalajara in 1986, is described as one that works extensively to promote and distribute Mexican and Ibero-American cinema.
Araiza said that Mexico’s film sector should look beyond dependence on the North American industry, and she described an inclusion program for minority and vulnerable groups, including seminars on disability cinema.
Asked about being a woman in Mexico, Araiza said that the difficulty is not unique to Mexico but has particular features there, including widespread acceptance of macho attitudes and normalized harassment. Tovar noted that the country’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) reports that 70% of women aged 15 and older have experienced at least one incident of psychological, physical, sexual, economic, patrimonial, or discriminatory violence in their lifetime.
