Foremost by Night

• Q&A with Víctor Iriarte April 6 at 8:15 at MOMA
• Q&A with Víctor Iriarte April 8 at 8:30 at FLC

Spanish artist and curator Víctor Iriarte’s debut feature unfolds across four epistolary chapters, following middle-aged Vera (Lola Dueñas) as she emerges from a years-long search for the biological son whom she gave up for adoption at birth, and whose identity and whereabouts were rendered all but untraceable by a callously negligent bureaucracy. When Vera’s letters reach teenaged Egoz (Manuel Egozkue) and his adoptive mother Cora (Ana Torrent), the three of them converge on the banks of Portugal’s Douro River for a long-delayed reunion—and a shared reckoning with the intimate legacies of Spain’s political history. Deceptively airy and noir-inflected, Iriarte’s unhurried, methodical gaze lingers over bodies and structures, interpolating velvety 16mm compositions with tactile close-ups of maps, floor plans, and microfiche newspaper clippings to evoke the textural and symbolic traces of a family discovering itself.