Maspalomas

👍 Maspalomas, dir. Aitor Arregi & Jose Mari Goenaga, 2025, Spain, 115 min., in Basque and Spanish with subtitles
Friday, June 19, 2026, 8:00 PM, Roxie Theatre
🌊 West Coast premiere
⚠️🔞 explicit sexual activity

Maspalomas

Frameline blurb: Accustomed to enjoying the debaucherous queer enclave of Maspalomas, 76-year-old Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz) finds himself at a crossroads when he must trade the intoxicating pleasures of his Canary Islands retreat for a conservative retirement community. Anchored by a strong central performance, Maspalomas is a life-affirming, tender portrait of what it means to stand firm in your identity — no matter your circumstances.

Without any close family to take him in, Vicente suddenly finds himself in a retirement home in Donostia back in Spain, away from the personal freedom that took him years to build. Unexpectedly surrounded by people from whom he must hide his queerness, Vicente embarks on a journey of rediscovery, reconnection, and reframing of his identity. Directed with remarkable tenderness by Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga, and featuring a powerful performance by Soroiz, who won a Goya Award (Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars®) for Best Actor, Maspalomas is a sobering but ultimately inspiring reminder that coming out is an ongoing process that never really stops.

My take: First, a couple of connections that sharp Frameline regulars may have picked up. In last year’s Four Mothers (Frameline49), the main character’s friends are off to Maspalomas Pride. (Maspalomas is on the island of Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, Spanish islands off the Atlantic coast of North Africa.) Three years ago, the feature film 20,000 Species of Bees (Frameline47) was set in the Basque Country, with much of the dialogue in the Basque language, a language isolate unrelated to any known languages. That is to say that Basque is as different from French or Spanish as it is from Japanese or Hawaiian. Watching Maspalomas on the press screener, I was surprised to find that it was open captioned with English subtitles, but also had closed captions available in the original languages, giving me the opportunity to see some of the Basque dialogue in written form.

In the first part of Maspalomas, we are immersed in Vicente’s life as an aging playboy in a gay resort town. He goes to the beach (and into the dunes), to the dance clubs (and into the back rooms), and to the sauna, and we see in some detail what he gets up to in those adventures; hence the caution about explicit sex. However, a sudden health crisis finds him in a retirement home, back in Basque Country, to convalesce. The other residents are fairly conservative, even in some cases frighteningly right-wing politically. His roommate Xanti (pronounced “Shahn-tee”) is friendly, but also remarkably intrusive. Vicente’s estranged daughter re-enters the picture, leaving him to work out how to reconnect. Vicente feels that he must go back into the closet in the retirement home, marking a radical shift in his circumstances.

If you live a free, openly gay lifestyle, how much might that change if you were thrust into a situation where homosexuality is taboo? How tenuous is the freedom we build for ourselves in our little gay bubbles? At just under 2 hours, Maspalomas is a long film, certainly not suited to a short attention span. However, it’s a worthwhile journey into the complexities (and fragilities) of growing older. Highly recommended.

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