The Permanent Picture

Who said time heals all wounds? Shot in her hometown of El Prat de Llobregat (located in the southwestern periphery of Barcelona) with an impressive cast of nonprofessional actors, Catalan writer-director Laura Ferrés’s alternately tender, clever, and mysterious debut feature mixes realism with melodrama in the story of a fiftysomething casting director who—while on an assignment to find “normal-looking people” for a left-leaning political party’s campaign video—unwittingly befriends the woman who gave birth to and abandoned her as a teenager in Andalusia. The Permanent Picture is a reunion film unlike any other: a strange yet genuine inquiry into familial love, estrangement, and image-making across generations, and whose thorny references to the legacy of Francoist Spain belie its endlessly generative charm and sense of humor.