Camino

Eleven year old Camino falls seriously ill. Her family, above all her mother, reads the pain as a religious test and converts the illness into the story of a saint. Inside the child's own world something else is happening: she has fallen in love for the first time and wants to be in the school play. Javier Fesser drew on the real story of a girl raised in the world of Opus Dei, and that source produced a substantial controversy. Objections from the family and from the organisation followed the film from its release, with public demands that the director retract. The film's strength is that it never hides which side it is on. The wider the gap grows between the child's delight and the meaning adults keep loading onto her, the more uncomfortable it becomes. It won six awards at the twenty third Goyas, including best film and best director. The difficulty is tonal. It shuttles between fairytale sequences and hospital realism across two hours and forty minutes. Who it is for: viewers who want a hard film about religion and childhood. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot sit through a sick child story.