Queens

A collective same-sex wedding ceremony in Spain is a few days away. The five mothers of the young men getting married end up in each other's lives during the preparations. One is a famous actress, one owns a hotel, one is the mother of the judge who will conduct the ceremony. Each has something unspoken between herself and her son, and the wedding compresses all of it into the same week. The film was made in 2005, the year Spain legalised same-sex marriage, and looks directly at that moment: the subject is not the couples marrying but how the families deal with it. The cast is built from the best-known actresses in Spanish cinema, with Carmen Maura, Verónica Forqué, Marisa Paredes and Mercedes Sampietro in the same film. Manuel Gómez Pereira runs the story as comedy and does not take the conflicts anywhere hard. The result is light but records the temper of the moment directly.