The queer first love sto­ry set in Spain’s Roma community

As the men and women around them clap to a fla­men­co beat and sing repeat­ed­ly ​“he took her away, the pret­ti­est thing in my home is to be wed,” two teenage girls dance close­ly togeth­er. One is osten­ta­tious­ly adorned in a bejew­elled, fig­ure-hug­ging dress with a cut-out pan­el high­light­ing her toned stom­ach. She is Car­men, 17 and cel­e­brat­ing her engage­ment to Rafa, the cousin of her danc­ing part­ner, Lola.

Yet poised to threat­en her engage­ment – and both girls’ futures in their Roma com­mu­ni­ty – is the bur­geon­ing attrac­tion between them. While Car­men is less aware of this attrac­tion in the moment, Lola, who pri­vate­ly iden­ti­fies as a les­bian, is all too con­scious of it. The clap­ping and singing fades out in favour of Nina Aranda’s melan­cholic score, as close-ups of the girls’ hands and faces con­vey the inti­ma­cy of their touch for a brief moment. Then Rafa returns to dance with Car­men, and the spell is shattered.

Among the film’s strengths is its doc­u­men­tary-like obser­va­tion of every­day rit­u­als with­in a Roma com­mu­ni­ty on the the Madrid out­skirts. Lola is the only non-“whitey” at her school. She dreams of explor­ing life out­side of her com­mu­ni­ty, get­ting an edu­ca­tion and pur­su­ing her inter­est in ornithol­o­gy. Her father, Paco, wants her to work at his mar­ket stall, attend the local Evan­gel­i­cal church and find a Romani boy to marry.

Writer/​director Aran­txa Echevar­ría approach­es the Roma way of life sen­si­tive­ly in her debut fea­ture. One mem­o­rable scene in a hair salon high­lights the belit­tle­ment and per­se­cu­tion this group faces from wider Span­ish soci­ety. How­ev­er the script does not hes­i­tate to draw atten­tion to the community’s huge­ly patri­ar­chal and het­ero­nor­ma­tive atti­tudes. When Paco express­es con­cern about his daugh­ter going out alone, Lola’s younger broth­er patro­n­is­ing­ly promis­es to watch her. And when their moth­er lob­bies for Lola’s free­dom of move­ment, Paco threat­ens to hit her. You get the sense from their dia­logue that these are com­mon dis­putes in this family.

The per­for­mances, from a cast com­prised almost entire­ly of non-pro­fes­sion­al actors plucked from the com­mu­ni­ty itself, are raw and nat­u­ral­is­tic . In par­tic­u­lar Zaira Romero as Lola and Rosy Rodríguez as Car­men are entranc­ing in their com­mit­ment to both their char­ac­ters and the sto­ry. As Echevar­ría her­self has observed of the film, both girls took a huge risk in accept­ing these roles. ​“I had to talk with their par­ents. I want­ed to explain that this film is going to be shown in cin­e­mas, all [of their] com­mu­ni­ty are going to see them, and maybe in the future they will not mar­ry, or will have prob­lems with [mar­ry­ing].”

Echevarría’s inspi­ra­tion for the film was a news arti­cle she read about the first les­bian wed­ding between two women from Spain’s Roma com­mu­ni­ty. ​“It was scary because it was a pic­ture of them from the back – you couldn’t see their faces – with fake names,” the direc­tor explains. ​“And the worst thing: no one from the fam­i­ly went to the wed­ding. So I thought ​‘I would love to take this pic­ture, see their faces, and think about their first love’.”

While eager to approach the sto­ry specif­i­cal­ly as a tale of first love rather than for­bid­den love, Echevarría’s script nonethe­less does not shy away from how the com­mu­ni­ty regards homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as taboo. Carmen’s own ini­tial reac­tion upon dis­cov­er­ing the nature of Lola’s feel­ings for her is cru­el and deroga­to­ry – in line with the inter­nalised homo­pho­bia that often man­i­fests in queer mem­bers of con­ser­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ties – but it’s not long before her intrigue and rec­i­p­ro­cal attrac­tion get the bet­ter of her.

The pair embark on a secret love affair, shown in ten­der stolen moments in the more hid­den loca­tions of their run­down neigh­bour­hood. ​“You think that nev­er again you’ll love this way,” Echevar­ría says of falling in love for the first time. ​“In that moment you can kill your­self, kill every­body, go to war – you’re so pow­er­ful, beautiful.”

Yet for such young women, the tragedy of their sit­u­a­tion is that if they wish to love freely, they would have to leave their com­mu­ni­ty, which – despite its het­eropa­tri­ar­chal con­straints – is the only safe­ty net they’ve ever had. Only those with the priv­i­lege of know­ing they have a safe and viable future could think this choice is easy. For Car­men and Lola, to con­tin­ue to love one anoth­er in the face of ostraci­sa­tion and uncer­tain­ty is an act of rebel­lion and immense bravery.