Palma

Palma, the first fiction film by Belgian filmmaker Alexe Poukine, follows the relationship between a single mother (played by Poukine herself) and her six-year-old daughter, who arrive in Palma de Mallorca for a weekend holiday. All the effort is little when it comes to raising a child and the physical and mental exhaustion is infinite. The precariousness of work and the mother's guilt are overriding, and above all the frustration of both of them. Mother and daughter are pure confusion, the girl rebels, demands more attention than she needs. The mother looks out of the window and sees only carefree young people, in a scene in which, rather than longing for youth, she seems to wish to escape from a burden greater than the passage of time. For Poukine the conflict does not lie in being a good or bad mother, what she shows is something more than a mother, a woman, a person trapped in the lowest hours and pushed to the sacrifice of upbringing with its lights and shadows. When the mother finally decides to escape for a few hours to try to rest her beleaguered mind, another obstacle arises: the men in the street are also ready to claim her attention. In just 39 minutes, Poukine gets to the essence of an authentic female experience and, as in her previous film What Doesn't Kill You (2019), she reveals herself as one of the great storytellers of all those human stories that have yet to be told. NURIA CUBAS