The Dinner

The Spanish Civil War is over; two weeks have passed. Franco wants to give his generals a banquet at the Palace Hotel in Madrid to celebrate the victory. Lieutenant Molina is given the preparations. The problem is that the best cooks in the country are in prison as reds and about to be shot. Molina takes five of them from the edge of execution and brings them into the kitchen. Something other than a menu is being prepared there. Manuel Gómez Pereira directs, from a screenplay by Joaquín Oristrell and Yolanda García Serrano. The source is José Luis Alonso de Santos's 2008 play La cena de los generales. The cast includes Mario Casas, Alberto San Juan, Asier Etxeandia and Nora Hernández, along with Eva Ugarte, Antonio Resines and Elvira Mínguez. The tone is comic and the subject is death. The everyday bustle of preparing a dinner and the fact that the cooks will be killed the next day stand in the same scene, and the humour comes from the contradiction. The narrative concentrates in one place, the kitchen, and does not hide its theatrical source. It premiered at the San Sebastián film festival and opened in Spain on 17 October 2025. It won the Goya for best adapted screenplay in 2026. Its weakness is balance; the transitions between the escape plan and the comedy do not hold everywhere and some characters remain a single trait. Who it is for: viewers who like Spanish period comedy and films about the aftermath of the Civil War. Who it is not for: details are lost without the historical context, and the comic tone does not everywhere sit with the weight of the subject.