95 min | NR | January 26, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films
A seven-year-old girl spends a single day in a crowded family home as the relatives prepare a birthday party for her dying father. The adults cook and decorate and quietly come apart. Lila Avilés builds an entire world out of one afternoon and never lets you look away.
Sol is seven years old. Her family gathers at her grandfather’s house to throw a birthday party for her father, Tonatiuh, who is dying of cancer. The film unfolds across a single day of cooking, cleaning, and waiting. A healer arrives to cleanse the house of bad energy while the aunts argue over the cake. Underneath the preparations sits the thing no one will say to Sol. Her father is leaving, and the party is a goodbye dressed up as a celebration.
Naíma Sentíes plays Sol as a watcher. She moves through the house taking in the adults and registering what they hide. Montserrat Marañón plays Nuri, the aunt who bakes the cake and runs the party and then dissolves into tears in a bathroom when the work gets too heavy. Marisol Gasé plays Alejandra with brittle control, the sister who hires the medium and manages the logistics of mourning. Mateo García Elizondo plays Tonatiuh mostly from behind a closed door, a young father too sick to stand, rationing his strength for the moment he can face his daughter. Iazua Larios plays Lucía, Sol’s mother, who arrives from work late and tired and carrying the guilt of the hours she missed.
Lila Avilés writes and directs, and she shoots the film at Sol’s height. The handheld camera stays low and close, so the adults loom and the small rooms feel enormous. Avilés crowds the frame with life. A parrot, a tank of snails, potted plants, a dog, until the house becomes its own breathing organism. The sound design layers overlapping conversations from different rooms, so the audience eavesdrops the way a child does. The meaning accumulates in the corners of the image instead of the center.
Avilés trusts the small gesture over the speech. There is no scene where someone sits Sol down and explains death to her. There is only a girl watching her family perform joy around a loss they refuse to name. The film holds its emotion until the final minutes and then releases it without a single false note. It understands that children know more than adults admit, and that the cruelest thing you can do to a child is pretend.