There is a moment, early in “Maspalomas,” when the camera tracks behind Vicente as he moves through the dunes of Gran Canaria, a 76-year-old man at home in a landscape of sun, sand and unembarrassed desire. Then a stroke, a daughter, a nursing home, and the man who spent decades fighting to live openly quietly retreats behind a door he thought he had closed forever.
That door is the engine of the film from Basque directors Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi, the Moriarti duo behind “The Endless Trench,” “Marco” and “Flowers.” After premiering at the 73rd San Sebastián Film Festival and collecting nine Goya nominations including a best actor win for José Ramón Soroiz who plays Vicente at February’s 40th Goya Awards, “Maspalomas” now travels to New York as part of the inaugural “And the Goya Goes To… New Spanish Films” showcase, running April 16–19 at Village East by Angelika and NYU’s Espacio de Culturas.
The film screens Sunday, April 19 and is followed by a Q&A with co-star Nagore Aranburu who plays Vicente’s estranged daughter, and who on the same Goya night picked up best supporting actress for Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s “Sundays,. which opens the New York showcase. The conversation will be moderated by Mateo Sancho Cardiel, a CUNY sociology lecturer whose doctoral research compared the lives of gay older adults in Madrid and New York.
For Goenaga, who wrote the screenplay, the project began in 2016 with two collisions: a first trip to Maspalomas, the famed gay enclave on Gran Canaria, and a news article about LGBTQ+ elders going back into the closet upon entering residential care. “I came out from the closet very late,” Goenaga told Variety. “It’s hard to think that when something takes you a long time to do, and finally you do it, at the end of your life you are going to go back.”
What he and Arregi built around that premise is a character study of a man whose bravery has a complicated arc. Vicente, played by Soroiz in a performance that has now collected a San Sebastián Festival Silver Shell, and Forqué, Feroz and Goya prizes in Spain, came out at 50, left his wife and daughter, and spent 25 years living openly with a partner. The film picks him up after that relationship has ended, before the stroke pulls him back to San Sebastián and into an institution.
“I have seen films about people coming out of the closet,” Arregi said. “I haven’t seen people staying out — and then coming back inside. It speaks about how human psychology functions, how you sometimes prefer to be in peace. You don’t want conflict. You don’t want to feel that you’re rejected. That’s very human.”
For the directors, the nursing home acts as a symbol. “It’s a place where everything is supposed to be homogenic,” Goenaga explained. “It depends on you to say that you are homosexual but also that you are a sexual person.” The film, in his telling, asks whether Maspalomas itself was Vicente’s coming out or just a prettier kind of hiding. “What is Maspalomas? It’s a huge closet.”
That double erasure, of queerness and of late-life desire, is what drew Cardiel, who teaches at BMCC and remains involved with SAGE, the U.S. organization advocating for LGBTQ+ elders since the 1970s. “The film really captures the structural invisibility queer older adults face in healthcare settings,” he told Variety. “It shows something that comes up again and again in research: how entering institutional care can push people back into the closet.”
Cardiel sees Vicente as a corrective to advocacy that focuses on what he calls “the productive years,” leaving children and elders out of the picture. “Gay older adults challenge the idea that desire, intimacy or sexuality somehow disappear later in life,” he said. The film, he argues, “almost works as a kind of manifesto. It doesn’t present the main character simply as a victim, but as a more complex figure — someone shaped by years of stigma and self-protection.”
The risk in any film like this is tonal. “Maspalomas” is by turns erotic, funny, tender and grim. Its opening dune sequences are as graphically sexual as anything in mainstream Spanish cinema this year, its nursing-home scenes patient and clinical. “It’s not a comedy,” Arregi said. “But you have to have humor, otherwise it can be a big drama in a nursing house. People have to smile. Sometimes laugh.”
For Cardiel, the timing of the New York screening is no accident. “For many older queer people, the current climate feels like déjà vu,” he warns. “A reminder that rights are not only historically fragile, but also biographically contingent — especially when aging, immigration status or disability intersect. Being queer is easier now. But being old is getting more and more precarious.”
Goenaga, asked what he wants viewers to take from Vicente, keeps coming back to one word: understood. “Maybe the viewer doesn’t share his decisions. But the goal is that they understand him. I don’t like when, in a film, you feel that the people behind it are telling you what you should think.”
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