Chinas

In Madrid, Lucía is nine. Her family came from China and runs a bazaar. She wants to have her birthday at Burger King. At school she meets Xiang, also nine, born in China but adopted by a Spanish family. Xiang starts asking about her biological family. There is a third girl too: Lucía's older sister Claudia, a teenager caught between two worlds. Arantxa Echevarría writes and directs. It opened in Spain on 6 October 2023. Its starting point is personal. Echevarría kept meeting the daughter of the people who ran a bazaar in her own neighbourhood, and began from there to look into the lives of the second generation Chinese born in Madrid. What the film is interested in is not migration but what migration becomes in the second generation. Lucía speaks Spanish and plays with Spanish children, and at home there is an entirely different order; neither side fully accepts her. The adoption line is the riskiest thing in the narrative, and Echevarría leaves it without tying it to an emotional miracle. The child actors are not professionals, and most of the film's naturalness comes from that. Who it is for: viewers interested in migrant experience in Spain and social drama told from a child's view. Who it is not for: the three lines do not run at equal depth, the teenage strand stays thin, and the narrative scatters in places.