Name: The Beloved
Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Released: 2026
Duration: 135 min

Javier Bardem enthrals as a legendary director with ambiguous intentions who casts his estranged daughter in an upcoming film.

Esteban, a widely laurelled enfant terrible of global cinema, has returned to Spain to shoot a period film entitled Desert. He wants his daughter Emilia – who’s had roles on TV, and whom he hasn’t seen in 30 years – to play the lead. Despite having baggage around his alcoholism and aggression, she takes the part. Once together, the pair feel the heat not just of the production’s Canary Islands setting but also of the tensions that simmer between them.

The plot line of the latest feature from Goya Award–winning director Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts; Mother, MIFF 2018) may evoke Sentimental Value, but it trades in Joachim Trier’s optimistic take on filial reconciliation for a far more scorching account of familial messiness. Alongside questions of nepotism, ulterior motives and creative exploitation, The Beloved makes ingenious use of myriad film stocks – from sombre black-and-white to shaky, vibrant handheld; from 16mm to 35mm to digital – to convey differing mental states, circumstances and slants on the past. Matching Javier Bardem’s career-best performance as a morally murky agent of patriarchal power, Victoria Luengo (Bitter Christmas, MIFF 2026) portrays Emilia’s guardedness and resentment with sophisticated grace.

“Sorogoyen’s superbly acted and dramatically compelling study of generational rifts, gender divides and the deep, unhealing scars in a father–daughter relationship has a muscular, propulsive momentum.” – Screen Daily