Tras la piel
2016 · 19m · España
Directed by Antonio Ufarte
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After many years away, Duna returns to her home town to reunite with her sick father, and faces his rejection and incomprehension of her transsexuality, fighting for the acceptance of her identity with the support of her neighbour Rosa.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A trans homecoming drama sounds like it could be earnest and expected—but Ufarte refuses the reconciliation fantasy, letting the father's incomprehension stay incomprehensible, which is braver and weirder than consensus LGBTQ+ cinema usually gets.
The film locates itself in a lineage of European intimate realism—Haneke, Koreeda—where family estrangement becomes the formal subject itself; the melancholic pacing and restraint suggest a director thinking carefully about what cinema can hold without breaking.
What lifts this beyond earnestness is the recurring decision to frame Duna and Rosa's quiet moments together with the same compositional weight as the scenes of paternal rejection—a visual insistence that tenderness between neighbors is as dramatically significant as family trauma.