• ‘Ben’Imana’ is the first Rwandan film ever to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, competing in Un Certain Regard.
• Director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo spent over a decade developing the film, which explores justice and forgiveness after the 1994 Tutsi genocide.
• The film was mentored into existence by filmmakers Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and legendary Ethiopian director Haile Gerima.
• Most of the cast are non-professional actors — survivors and community members whose real stories shaped the film.
• ‘Ben’Imana’ is currently seeking U.S. distribution after its Cannes premiere.

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo didn’t set out to make history. She set out to make an honest film about her community — about what it means to forgive, and what happens when you can’t. The fact that Ben’Imana became the first Rwandan film to ever screen at the Cannes Film Festival, competing in Un Certain Regard, feels like a byproduct of that honesty rather than any grand design. And after more than a decade in development, Dusabejambo is taking it all in stride.

“I feel relieved,” she said ahead of the premiere, with what was described as a relaxed smile. “This is a real joy and relief, especially when you’ve worked on a project for as long as I have. I’ve had time to really get prepared for this moment.”

That preparation shows in every frame. Ben’Imana is a remarkable debut — patient, formally inventive, and emotionally devastating in the way that only deeply researched, deeply personal filmmaking can be. Set in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 2012, the film unfolds nearly two decades after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group, when extremist Hutu militias killed hundreds of thousands of people — in some communities, roughly half the population overnight. The Rwandan government has since established community-led courts across the country, and the film opens on one of these outdoor trials: a man named Karangwa pleading guilty to murdering the siblings of Vénéranda, a middle-aged woman who stands before the people’s court and calmly, with almost no visible emotion, declares that she forgives him.

The court rules in his favor. And Vénéranda’s sister, Suzanne, is furious.

“She has no right to forgive on behalf of our family,” Suzanne declares — and with that, Ben’Imana announces exactly what kind of film it is. Not a story of tidy reconciliation, but one that asks whether forgiveness can be demanded, distributed, or even meaningful when it comes at someone else’s insistence.

A Story That Lives in Its Contradictions

Vénéranda, played with extraordinary restraint by Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi, is the film’s moral center — and its central contradiction. She leads community testimonial sessions for women preparing to testify, part of a national reconciliation program called “Rwanditude.” The sessions are designed as safe spaces: attendees can cry, shout, stay silent. “We carry wounds which are not of interest to the public or the judges,” Vénéranda tells them in one session. “So no need to overexpose ourselves again.”

And yet, at home, she’s rigid and unforgiving in ways that quietly indict her public grace. When her late-teenage daughter, Tina, turns up unexpectedly pregnant by a young man named Richard — implied to be Hutu, though his family is never connected to the massacres — Vénéranda’s composure cracks. The film’s closest thing to a darkly comic beat is the near-immediate cut between Vénéranda preaching that “forgiveness is the key” and then disparaging Richard to her daughter on the walk home from church.

Dusabejambo doesn’t judge Vénéranda for this. She understands her. That’s what makes it land so hard.

The testimonial sessions themselves generate some of the film’s most gripping sequences — spaces where disparate people attempt to reconcile their individual scars from something they each experienced entirely differently. One of the program’s most complex presences is Madeleine, the mother of men who carried out killings. She attends as part of the program’s push to encourage forgiveness between victims and perpetrators’ families. A single line she delivers — “My babies were like the others” — is among the film’s most quietly devastating moments.

Another standout figure is Victoire, a woman who keeps her face cloaked at all times and who, at home, still prepares food for her long-dead children. They were killed by her own brothers and father. She is present in the sessions but never speaks in the group — opting instead for private conversations with Vénéranda. Through her, and through Madeleine, Dusabejambo and co-writer Delphine Agut explore how wounds travel beyond those who were physically present during the atrocities — how they seep into the next generation, shape silences, become ghosts.

“Darling, why should I remember ghosts?” Suzanne tells Tina at one point, deflecting a question about her niece’s father, of whom the family has no photo. It’s a line that cuts two ways: a survivor’s self-protection, and an unintentional cruelty toward the young woman left to carry unanswered questions into her future.

How a Mathematician Became Rwanda’s Most Important Filmmaker

Dusabejambo was born and raised in Kigali and, in her early twenties, was on track for a career in electronics and telecommunications — not cinema. The pivot came through a series of encounters that feel almost fated in retrospect.

Lee Isaac Chung — who would go on to direct Minari — was living in Rwanda in the early 2000s while his wife worked as a counselor in Kigali. During that time, he began developing and shooting his debut feature, Munyurangabo (2007), in Dusabejambo’s own neighborhood. She had free time and wandered onto the set. The two stayed in contact, and years later, after she’d completed her maths qualification and was heading toward a telecom job, Chung sent her a link to a short film script competition hosted by the Tribeca Film Festival.

She submitted. She won. And then she tried to hand the directing off to someone else.

“I thought someone else could direct it,” she recalled. “But Isaac insisted that I make the film. He said the world needed more women making films. That’s how I got started.” Chung traveled to Rwanda to give her the basics. “I had never looked into a camera,” she said. “I started from scratch with Isaac.”

After a few years on the festival circuit with short films, she began developing Ben’Imana. That’s when Haile Gerima entered the picture. The legendary Ethiopian director behind Sankofa and Teza happened to be sitting in the back of a pitching session where Dusabejambo was presenting the project — and getting demolished by the feedback.

“I got all the bad feedback one can get, so I was sitting down trying to decide whether I would continue or not,” she said. “Then Haile came up to me and said, ‘Oh, sister, I didn’t hear anything you said because you were speaking in French, but go home and send me your script in English.'”

She didn’t know who he was. She looked him up, took him up on the offer, and received a complete DVD collection of his work in return. For five years after that, Gerima invited her annually to his filmmaking workshop in Luxembourg. “He’s very tough and often gives you comments you don’t want to hear,” she said. “But I learned so much, not only about filmmaking but about myself and Rwanda.”

That influence is visible in the film’s structure — or rather, its deliberate resistance to conventional structure. Ben’Imana unravels slowly and from multiple angles, more interested in accumulating emotional truth than in hitting narrative marks. Like Gerima’s best work, it has very little patience for the idea that a story about profound human experience should move at anyone else’s pace.

A Truly African Production

Dusabejambo has been labeled a “self-taught filmmaker” in various press materials — a description she pushes back on firmly. But she is deeply proud of what Ben’Imana represents structurally, beyond her own journey. The film is a co-production between Rwanda, Gabon, France, Norway, and the Ivory Coast, with mk2 handling international sales. It’s also one of the first titles funded by Rwanda’s new state-backed Film Fund — a process Dusabejambo describes as genuinely independent.

“The Fund is completely independent. I submitted like everyone else, and we got the money. There were no strings attached,” she said. The funding allowed her to hire a large local crew, many of whom were heading departments on a major production for the first time. The director of photography is Egyptian; his second assistant is from Gabon.

“We just need more financing from home so we can work without having to apply for foreign funding,” she said. “We can do this ourselves.”

Much of the cast, similarly, came from within the community the film depicts. Dusabejambo spent roughly a decade researching the film, listening to survivors and hearing confessions from perpetrators. In the beginning, she kept crying. Then she noticed that the women telling her these stories weren’t. “They’re not crying when they’re telling me this,” she realized. “Why am I crying?” That shift — from outsider emotion to insider understanding — became the film’s foundation.

She ultimately cast many of those women, despite their having no acting experience. “They bring in something that is real,” she said. Her role as director in those scenes was less about performance and more about language: “I was also trying to find their language: How do they talk about themselves? How do they talk about this history without being too reductive?”

The result is a film that knows exactly what it is — and what it refuses to be. Ben’Imana doesn’t offer the comfort of easy resolution. Forgiveness, as one speaker in Vénéranda’s sessions puts it, is not something we carry around in bags to hand out on demand. But the weight of what we suppress, the film suggests, can become heavier than anything we might say out loud.

Ben’Imana is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

The post ‘Ben’Imana’ Is a Stunning Cannes Debut About Rwanda appeared first on Cream.

• Strawberries premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
• The film follows Moroccan women working on a Spanish strawberry farm who face wage theft, sexual assault, and modern-day exploitation.
• Director Laila Marrakchi was inspired by a New York Times article written by a journalist friend, then traveled to Andalusia to meet the real women.
• Lead actress Nisrin Erradi carries the film with a performance critics are calling compellingly fierce and emotionally layered.
• The greenhouses were shot in Morocco after Spanish farms grew wary of cameras following news coverage of labor abuses in Andalusia.

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There’s a moment early in Strawberries that tells you everything you need to know about the world Laila Marrakchi has built. Hasna, freshly arrived from Morocco to pick fruit at a Spanish farm, faces her first task in a greenhouse row: what do you do with the unripe strawberries? Skip them and you look incompetent. Pick them and you’re wasting product. You have seconds to decide, and either answer might cost you the job — and the job is the only thing standing between your family back home and nothing. She guesses wrong. The supervisor moves on. And just like that, the rules of this world are established: there are no good choices here, only less catastrophic ones.

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That scene is something of a skeleton key for the whole film. Strawberries, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this week, is not a simple story of oppressed workers and villainous bosses, even if those elements are very much present. It’s a film about the weight of impossible decisions — and about what happens to a person’s sense of self when every option available to them has already been designed to fail.

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A Story Rooted in Real Lives

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Marrakchi, the Paris-based Casablanca-born director behind Marock and Rock the Casbah — and television work that includes Damien Chazelle’s Netflix series The Eddy and French spy thriller The Bureau — came to this story through a journalist friend who was reporting on Moroccan seasonal workers in Andalusia for The New York Times. Marrakchi went with her to Huelva, spent three days meeting the women, and came home changed.

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“I really discovered another world,” she said. “I was really moved by this woman. That’s why I decided to do this film.”

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The result, co-written with Delphine Agut, is a fictional drama inspired by real cases — a choice Marrakchi made deliberately. “In the end, with my screenwriter, we decided that it was best to take some distance from all that we had seen and read and work on it also with our imagination,” she explained. Real strawberry pickers appear as extras, but the central roles went to professional actresses. The greenhouses themselves were shot in Morocco after Spanish farms, skittish from recent press coverage of labor abuses, refused to cooperate. “People get scared when they see a camera,” Marrakchi noted.

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The film’s original Spanish title, La más dulce — “The Sweetest” — captures the central irony with quiet precision. “I like the idea of playing with these two things,” Marrakchi said. “The thing that is very sweet is also hard at the same time. The dream of having a better life comes with the difficulty of the hard work.”

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What Happens on the Farm

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The opening sequence is a masterclass in economical filmmaking. Close-ups of women’s hands being inspected, shot from above, communicate everything: these workers are interchangeable labor, assessed like produce. They’re promised up to €35 a day — wages that amount to very little in Spain but represent meaningful money for families in Morocco. Tense, driven Hasna (Nisrin Erradi, Everybody Loves Touda) arrives on the crossing with quiet, hijab-wearing Meriem (Hajar Graigaa), and they’re assigned cramped prefab container quarters alongside giggly Zineb (Hind Braik) and older Khadija (Fatima Attif). Pinned above Hasna’s bunk: a newspaper clipping about her winning a taekwondo gold medal, and a photo of a boy. The backstory will come later — and it’s worth the wait.

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The farm, “Fresa del Carmen,” runs on a logic designed entirely to benefit the owners. Paychecks arrive on no discernible schedule. Hours are calculated after the fact, with supervisors guessing how many breaks workers probably took and deducting accordingly. Pay is docked for bathroom breaks. The union rep Antonio (Nando Pérez) speaks no Arabic and appears to function as a management tool. Street vendors outside the camp sell blankets and prepaid phones at exploitative markups, knowing full well that the women have nowhere else to go. Nobody is rounding down.

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The film’s most difficult narrative turn comes early: when owner Iván (Paco Mora) enters the shower room with clear intent toward Meriem, Hasna chooses to leave rather than intervene. It’s a genuinely hard scene to sit with — Marrakchi doesn’t soften it or let Hasna off the hook. We understand the calculus. Using her taekwondo skills on Iván could mean losing everything. But understanding a choice and forgiving it are different things, and the script doesn’t always give us enough of Hasna’s interior life to fully bridge that gap. The revelation of her backstory comes too late to fully recalibrate our feelings about what she did.

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What follows is a cascade of Catch-22s. Meriem ends up working as a cleaner inside Iván’s house, with additional expectations attached. When she becomes pregnant and nearly dies from a miscarriage before being taken to a doctor, the farm owners respond by filing a kidnapping complaint against the aid workers who helped her. Police side with the owners and characterize the women as engaging in prostitution voluntarily. The legal system, as depicted here, isn’t indifferent to these women so much as it’s actively structured against them.

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The Performance at the Center

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What keeps Strawberries from collapsing under the weight of its subject matter is Erradi. She is, simply put, extraordinary — and the film knows it, keeping the camera close and trusting her to carry scenes that the script occasionally under-serves. Her Hasna moves through confusion, shame, anger, and something approaching defiance, and every transition feels earned even when the writing doesn’t fully explain it. “She’s powerful,” Marrakchi said of casting her. “She was the character that I wrote.”

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The supporting ensemble is strong throughout. Graigaa brings a quiet, devastating dignity to Meriem — a character who absorbs trauma largely in silence, which makes her suffering no less visible. The moments of warmth between the women, the laughter and teasing in their cramped quarters, are crucial to the film’s humanity. Marrakchi was insistent about including them. “It’s really important to humanize these women,” she said. “We live in the Western world and sometimes don’t realize that these people can love, can be funny and can be women just like everybody else.”

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The one significant weak link is Pilar (Itsaso Arana), the young human rights lawyer Hasna eventually approaches through sympathetic local organizer Ali (Mohamed Larbi Ajbar). Pilar’s naïveté about conservative Moroccan society tips from realistic into caricature — a one-dimensional do-gooder in a film that works hard everywhere else to resist easy characterizations.

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The Look of Exploitation

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Cinematographer Tristan Galand, whose recent work includes Souleymane’s Story, shoots the farm with a restless, slightly nervous camera that trails along the endless rows of plastic-covered greenhouses and settles alongside the women without ever quite letting them feel at rest. The visual grammar shifts noticeably inside Iván’s house — neutral lighting, fixed frames — and the contrast is exactly right: two worlds separated by a few kilometers and an unbridgeable power gap.

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Marrakchi also makes pointed use of the strawberries themselves. At first they’re gorgeous, evidence of what the land can produce. As the film progresses, the fruit rots and draws flies. The metaphor isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t need to be.

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“Speaking out is a privilege,” Marrakchi said, describing the real women whose stories feed the film. “For these Moroccan women, it’s difficult to speak up and speak out, because they can lose everything in Spain and in their home country.”

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Strawberries has its flaws — the pacing is fragmentary, the lawyer character is a genuine problem, and the script’s reluctance to fully excavate Hasna’s psychology leaves the film’s most ambitious emotional gambit only partially landed. But it’s also a work of real moral seriousness and considerable craft, anchored by a lead performance that commands your attention from the first frame to the last. Marrakchi set out to make an homage to women who are rarely seen. She’s done that, and then some.

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Strawberries is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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“category”: “Movies

The post Cannes 2026: ‘Strawberries’ Review appeared first on Cream.

• Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut Club Kid premiered at Cannes 2026 to a 7-minute standing ovation in the Un Certain Regard section
• The comedy-drama stars Firstman as a washed-up NYC party promoter who discovers he has a 10-year-old son
• The film co-stars Cara Delevingne, Diego Calva, Miss Benny, and breakout newcomer Reggie Absolom
• Club Kid was produced by Alex Coco, who won Best Picture at the Oscars for Anora
• The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution after its Cannes world premiere

Jordan Firstman showed up to Cannes with something nobody quite expected from him: sincerity. And it floored everyone in the room.

The comedian, actor, and social media provocateur made his feature directorial debut Friday with Club Kid, premiering in the festival’s prestigious Un Certain Regard section inside the Théâtre Claude Debussy — and walking out of it to a thunderous seven-minute standing ovation. Firstman, who also wrote, executive produced, and stars in the 126-minute film, was visibly overwhelmed, hugging his cast as the applause rolled on.

It’s the kind of Cannes moment that turns careers. And for Firstman — who has spent years being labeled everything from “candid” to “confrontational” by a deeply divided internet — it felt genuinely earned.

What ‘Club Kid’ Is Actually About

Club Kid follows Peter, a drug-happy New York City party promoter who has spent a decade-plus of MDMA-addled revelry building a nightlife empire with his best friend and business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne, described by one critic as “perpetually coked-out” and “two inches from a breakdown at all times”). The story opens in Brooklyn in 2016 and jumps forward roughly a decade, when a woman Peter barely remembers shows up at his rent-controlled Manhattan apartment — left to him by his late mother — with an eight-year-old boy. The child, Arlo (newcomer Reggie Absolom), is Peter’s son, the result of a one-night encounter, and his mother has just died. Peter is now responsible for raising a kid he never knew existed.

The ensemble also includes Diego Calva as a child psychologist who becomes a tentative love interest, Miss Benny, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Eldar Isgandarov as Peter’s squatter houseguest Nicky (described by Hollywood Reporter as delivering “many of the film’s funniest line readings”), and Colleen Camp. The film was shot over 26 days on 35mm in real New York clubs — spaces Firstman accessed because he already knew them intimately.

“We were granted access to spaces that no one can even get to in life, let alone be filmed,” Firstman told The Hollywood Reporter. “We were let in because I was already there partying, and these are my friends. The invitation was not taken for granted.”

The subject matter is personal in ways that go beyond the obvious. Firstman has spoken openly about his years inside queer nightlife culture, watching the drug landscape shift — from Molly and coke to ketamine, GHB, Mephedrone — and the toll that takes on community. “You look around, and you see zombies where it should be a community,” he told IndieWire. “And sometimes that still feels like your community? It just changed.”

But the film, critics are quick to note, never becomes a morality play. “This is not a condemnation of people who do drugs or like to have fun,” Firstman explained. “This is more about this man who has overstayed his welcome, or never known a different option.”

The Reviews Are In — and They’re Glowing

IndieWire called Club Kid “brazen, funny, and surprisingly earnest,” writing that it “should put any nervous feelings to rest” about whether Firstman has the filmmaking chops to match his persona — and that “even his haters won’t be able to resist” what announces itself as “a major filmmaking talent with a sensitive side.” The Hollywood Reporter praised it as “a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way” and noted that Firstman and young Absolom share “such a lively, natural rapport” that the film’s more convenient plot mechanics barely register.

The soundtrack has drawn particular attention — Arthur Russell anchoring the film’s melancholy final act, and The White Lotus composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer contributing an original score. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra captures what one reviewer called “a certain lost-era grit” in New York, treating the city less as backdrop and more as character.

The film has also drawn comparisons to C’mon C’mon, Baby Boom, and even Kramer vs. Kramer — which tells you something about how unexpectedly it lands emotionally, given where it starts.

The Premiere Itself Was Pure Jordan Firstman

Before the screening, Firstman warmed up the Debussy crowd with a bit that immediately became the talk of the festival. Deliberately mispronouncing the theater’s name, he told the audience: “What an honor to play in the ‘Da-Bussy.’ I love ‘Da-Bussy.’ I can’t get enough of ‘Da-Bussy.’ I can live in ‘Da-Bussy,’ and I can’t wait for my film to screen in ‘Da-Bussy.'”

He also referenced a gay meme that apparently circulated widely in New York last year — a picture of a can of soup that read, “Some of you bitches would go to the opening of a can, and if the can sent you free clothes, you would post, ‘Thank you, the can!'” — which Firstman said he put in the movie precisely so he could one day say: “Thank you, the Cannes.”

Then, turning sincere on a dime in the way only he can, he told the room: “This movie was such an incredible experience, such a labor of love, a lot of crying, a lot of laughter, a lot of joy. I think it’s a film about cultivating kindness within your community and kindness for yourself. I just want to thank my beautiful cast here for giving me their time and their spirit and their stories and their souls and their looks. Let’s just say it: they’re hot.”

The Kid Who Made the Filmmaker Cry

Much of the film’s emotional weight rests on Firstman’s dynamic with Absolom, whom he discovered after watching hundreds of audition tapes out of London. “I remember seeing the thumbnail and being like, ‘Please be able to act, please be able to act, because that’s him,'” Firstman told IndieWire. “Then I met him, and we went for ice cream and talked about music. I sent all the kids the playlist I wrote the movie to. Reggie loved Massive Attack.”

Talking about Absolom’s experience on set — particularly a moment where the young actor bonded with the film’s ensemble of queer and trans performers — Firstman became emotional mid-interview. “For the rest of his life now he’s going to love trans people because he got to see how funny and creative they are, and listen to music with them and joke around with them,” he said, trailing off. “I think that’s the beauty of this story.”

That kind of openness is, by Firstman’s own admission, both his superpower and his vulnerability. “Everything shows on me,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe people have complicated feelings toward me because I can’t really hide anything.”

The Team Behind It

The film carries some serious producing pedigree. Alex Coco — who just won the Best Picture Oscar for Sean Baker’s Anora — produced alongside Lurker’s Galen Core, Topic Studios’ Ryan Heller and Michael Bloom. Executive producers include Firstman, Ian Stratford, Charles Croft, Jasmine Daghighian, Olmo Schnabel, and Daniela Taplin.

It marks Firstman’s first time at Cannes — and by all accounts, not his last. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution, and given the response inside the Debussy, that conversation is probably already happening.

“I didn’t want to win anyone over anymore,” Firstman told IndieWire ahead of the premiere. “All I could do was tell the story I wanted to tell in the way that I wanted to tell it.”

Turns out, that was more than enough.

The post Jordan Firstman’s ‘Club Kid’ Earns Standing Ovation at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Manuela Martelli’s The Meltdown premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2026 festival
• The film follows a 9-year-old girl at a Chilean ski resort in 1992 whose teenage friend mysteriously vanishes
• Newcomer Maya O’Rourke stars alongside Saskia Rosendahl (Babylon Berlin) as the missing girl’s desperate mother
• The film uses the mystery as an allegory for Chile’s collective silence in the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship
• It is currently seeking U.S. distribution

The image that opens The Meltdown is one of the stranger true stories in recent history: grainy camcorder footage of a 60-ton Antarctic iceberg being hoisted out of a frosty sea, bound for Chile’s pavilion at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville. It was meant to announce a country reborn — modern, ambitious, free from the shadow of Augusto Pinochet, who had finally been voted out of power four years earlier. Director Manuela Martelli has a very different reading of that iceberg. For her, it’s a nation trying to separate its gleaming tip from the cold, dark mass of history still lurking just beneath the surface.

That’s the kind of film The Meltdown is: precise, layered, and quietly devastating in its implications. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, marking Martelli’s first appearance in the official selection after her debut, Chile ’76, launched from the Directors’ Fortnight in 2022. That earlier film — a taut, critically acclaimed thriller about a bourgeois housewife’s political awakening under the Pinochet regime — established Martelli as one of the most distinctive voices in Chilean cinema. Her follow-up is equally elegant, if somewhat more elusive.

A Child’s-Eye View of a Country Learning to Forget

The year is 1992. Two years have passed since Pinochet left the presidency, but he still commands the military, and the nation exists in a strange in-between — officially democratic, inwardly paralyzed. Inés (Maya O’Rourke), a watchful, precocious nine-year-old, is staying at her grandparents’ remote Andean ski lodge while her parents are abroad, part of Chile’s delegation at Expo ’92 in Seville. She has the run of the place: befriending the hotel dogs, sleeping in the rooms of staff members she’s grown fond of, hanging at the front desk with receptionist Sonia (Paula Zúñiga), trading hellos with bartender Genaro (Luis Uribe) — a man who goes quiet whenever someone mentions his missing brother, one of Chile’s desaparecidos. Inés barely bats an eye. She was born into a world of strange ellipses.

What she’s not prepared for is losing someone she actually knows.

That someone is Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), a 15-year-old German skiing prodigy who has come to Chile to train. She’s the only girl on her team, gets bullied relentlessly by her male teammates, and receives a little too much attention from her coach, Alexander (Jakub Gierszal). Maybe that’s why she takes so quickly to Inés, despite the age gap — sharing her dark nail polish and broody music, letting the younger girl sleep in her room, confiding in her the way you confide in a diary. Hanna tells Inés that her mother is from East Germany, or as she puts it, “a country that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Then one morning, Hanna is gone.

The disappearance triggers a search, and soon Hanna’s mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl, best known from Babylon Berlin) arrives — wild-eyed, ferocious, guilt-ridden, and absolutely unwilling to accept the official indifference around her. Rosendahl is extraordinary here, a former East German figure skating champion who channels every ounce of that competitive fury into finding her daughter. She and Inés form an unlikely alliance: a daughter who needs a mother, a mother who needs a daughter, with Inés serving as translator as Lina tears through the Andean resort demanding answers that nobody seems to want to give.

Inés, you see, knows something. She saw something, late one night, pretending to be asleep in Hanna’s room. And her grandmother Techa (Paulina Urrutia), a hyper-capitalistic woman laser-focused on selling a defunct military outpost on the mountain to a couple of Spanish investors and expanding the resort, has made it very clear: keep quiet, or the authorities will start asking questions about Inés’ teenage cousin Sebastián (Lautaro Cantillana), who also had an eventful evening with Hanna before she vanished.

What the Iceberg Really Means

Martelli, who is herself an accomplished actress, has spoken openly about drawing on her own childhood for this film. “I was 9 years old in 1992,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, describing a time “permeated by this transition in Chile, which was a very weird and complex moment. For me, it was interesting to overlap the transition of a kid and the transition of a country and the world as well.” The Berlin Wall had just fallen. The GDR was gone. Chile was, at least on paper, moving forward. And yet.

“The idea of horror was so present for me in this period of history, because there was something hidden there,” Martelli explained. “I had this idea of walking over dead bodies, because people disappeared, and you didn’t know where they were. They could be anywhere. I wanted everything to feel ambiguous. It’s not that it’s a horror movie, but it kind of flirts with that.”

That horror-adjacent quality comes through in Benjamín Echazarreta’s muted, evasive cinematography — light that seems to scurry away from the lens — and in María Portugal’s score, which swings between Bernard Herrmann-esque bursts of discordant strings and something more ominously quiet underneath. The production design by Nohemí González and Carolina Espina’s costumes are immaculate, period-perfect without ever feeling like a museum display. (One hand-stitched sweater Inés wears, reviewers have noted, is almost heartbreaking in its brightness.)

The snow globe-like setting does exactly what Martelli intends: the powder and the clouds are the same shade of white, earth and sky bleeding together, the world beyond the resort feeling almost impossible to imagine. It’s a hermetically sealed innocence that the film both celebrates and indicts. Inés has been raised to not ask certain questions. The hotel staff has learned to not mention certain names. The grandmother has learned to not discuss certain political figures. And now a girl is missing, and everyone’s instinct is still — silence.

Where the Film Stumbles

The parallels are genuinely powerful, and O’Rourke’s performance is a remarkable piece of work — watchful and uncertain and deeply felt, never cute, never precocious in the annoying way. Martelli raves about her young lead: “She has such a presence. I was really amazed. She had to act in English and Spanish; she had to act in the snow. It was really hard for her, but Maya was amazing. She’s a real warrior.”

But the film’s insistence on filtering everything through Inés’ deliberately limited perspective eventually becomes a constraint. Children do stress-test their realities — constantly, frustratingly — and The Meltdown increasingly has to sideline Inés entirely to keep the tension alive, because her passivity, while thematically intentional, creates a chilling drag on the story’s forward momentum. The adults around her, meanwhile, are mostly content to remain passive in their desire to sweep things under the rug, which is sinister in its own right but leaves the film with limited dramatic options.

A few directorial choices overreach. An opening sequence lingers on blood spiraling down a bathroom sink — from a lost baby tooth, as it turns out — in a way that feels like foreshadowing with the volume cranked too high. A later close-up of a shattered glass of milk lands as distraction rather than resonance. These are quibbles, but they’re symptomatic of a film that occasionally mistakes restraint for withholding.

The iceberg Chile shipped to Seville, it’s worth remembering, started melting before it even arrived. By the time the expo ended, only the main body remained — invisible to the naked eye, but hard as a fact. That’s the image Martelli leaves you with, really. The past doesn’t disappear. It just gets covered up, sometimes not even all that well.

The Meltdown is currently seeking U.S. distribution. It is produced by Ronda Cine, Cinema Inutile and Wood Producciones, with international sales handled by Les Films du Losange.

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