Writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias made her feature debut with 'Forastera' in a place that belongs more to her past than her present, returning to Mallorca and the world of her father's family after years spent in States. Lucía considers whether that distance sharpened her perspective or left her questioning her authority to tell this story, and how English entered the mix alongside Catalan and Spanish in a film set entirely on the island.

Our conversation turns to the polka dot romper Cata finds in her grandmother's closet, an object whose pattern eventually made its way onto the poster and shaped the film's visual language, and to Zoe Stein, Lucía's collaborator since the original short, and the particular challenge of directing grief expressed as imitation, as Cata absorbs her late grandmother's clothes, mannerisms, and eventually her voice. We then discuss where a character inhabiting someone else ends and an actor inhabiting that character begins, and reflects on how differently each family member processes the same loss, from participation to withdrawal, and how much of that came from life around her versus invention.

We explore the film's relationship to Mallorca's overwhelming summer light, and the choice to locate unease inside brightness rather than shadow, anchored by a lamp that keeps flickering and malfunctioning throughout the house. Lucía closes by weighing in on the ghost story label so often attached to the film, and whether she considers it one herself or finds the term too narrow for what she was actually after.

(Photo credit: Monica Lek)