Flowers From Another World

A film set in a Spanish village. Santa Eulalia is a small place. There are no young women left; they have all gone to the cities. There are unmarried men there. There is land, there are houses, there are no women. The council organises something. A busload of women is brought in and a festival is held. The women are mostly migrants. From the Caribbean, from Latin America. From there the film runs three lines at once. Patricia is from the Dominican Republic. She has two children and no papers. She marries Damián. He is well-meaning and lives with his mother. The mother does not want her. There is friction in the house every day. Milady is from Cuba. Young, and used to city life. Carmelo brought her. He went to Cuba and persuaded her. She is bored in the village. She does not want to stay and he meets that with violence. Marirrosi is from Bilbao. Spanish, a nurse, and alone. She has been writing to Alfonso. They love each other but she cannot bring herself to leave her job and move to the village. What the narrative is interested in is not love but a bargain: its idea is that these marriages are an exchange; the men offer a life, the women want papers and security, and both sides know it. The villagers do not accept the women. They talk, they stare, they exclude. Patricia's line is the most hopeful. She holds out and in time makes a place. Milady's line is the hardest. The narrative softens nothing there. Marirrosi's line is a quiet loss. The ending is neither happy nor dark; the three lines go to three different places. It was shot in a real village in the province of Guadalajara and some of the villagers appear in it. The film took the top prize of Critics' Week at Cannes. Icíar Bollaín directed. José Sancho, Luis Tosar, Lissete Mejía and Marilyn Torres are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Spanish social realism and narratives about migration. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a single story; the narrative splits three ways and takes none of them all the way.