The Good Daughter, a Spanish drama about divorce and family conflict and their impact on children from writer-director Júlia de Paz Solvas that stars the 17-year-old Kiara Arancibia, just won the Grand Prix, the top award, in the main competition of the 29th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. It also received the fest’s Audience Award, and Arancibia was honored with the best actress honor in the main Tallinn competition for her role, which marks her acting debut.
The Good Daughter is an adaptation of the director’s own 2021 short film Harta. In addition to Arancibia, the cast also includes Janet Novas, Petra Martínez, and Julián Villagrán, who won three actor awards for his role as the father in the short.
“The teenage Carmela’s father is violent, and a restraining order has been imposed on him with regard to the girl’s mother,” reads a synopsis for The Good Daughter. “In spite of that, Carmela is very fond of her father. She is allowed to meet with her father, but these meetings take place with restrictions and under the supervision of a social worker. The parents’ divorce places the girl in a difficult situation where she seems to be expected to pick a side. The child’s absolute love for her father starts to crumble, but not through Carmela’s fault.”
Júlia de Paz Solvas wrote the script for the movie, which was shot near Barcelona, with Núria Dunjó. Beta Cinema is handling sales for the film from producers Astra Pictures and Avalon, co-produced by Krater Films.
Check out a trailer for The Good Daughter here.
Arancibia, who earned rave reviews in Tallinn for her layered and restrained performance, tells THR that she worked with actress Tamara Casellas as a coach. “There were a lot of things going on, and she was really, really helpful,” the young actress explains. “And she helped me manage my emotions and put my emotions from the belly to my eyes.”
Restraint was also key for director de Paz Solvas’ approach, which grabs viewers while making rare explosions of emotion feel extra impactful. “When Núria and I investigated [our topics] for the screen, we saw that these children didn’t have the space to express their emotions,” she tells THR. “And so for us, it was important that Carmela also didn’t have the space to express it.”
She concludes: “For me, the message of the film is that these children seem silent for society and for the judicial system. It was important for us to represent that violence has a lot more layers than we understand. There is also psychological violence, and for us, it was important to show this violence in a more subtle way because the violence can be everywhere.”
A scene in a swimming pool was among the technically most challenging sequences to shoot for the director.
Her young star also mentions a scene featuring the daughter and her mother in a forest as a challenging interplay of movement and camera. “It was all about our bodies,” she recalls. “It was very physical. It was like a dance of our bodies. The principal emotion was anger, expressed in a conversation between the bodies.”
How did Arancibia manage to deal with all the emotional scenes she had to act out in The Good Daughter? “Carmela is one thing, and Kiara is another,” she said. “It was about understanding that this was not happening to me.”
The filmmakers made a conscious decision to change the title of the short, which translates to “Fed Up,” for the feature. “It was a long conversation,” explains Dunjó. “We thought we wanted to evolve from the short film. The short was very concrete; it was something that had to do with anger. And this feature film was bigger. It includes more emotions than the short film and more layers, including with the family and with other worlds. So we thought it had to be bigger. And, of course, The Good Daughter is what Carmela is trying to be to her father and to her mother. So it has this double meaning.”
Director de Paz Solvas and her writing partner Dunjó are already developing a new project. “Characters are always the most important thing for us in a story,” the director says. “But I want to explore a new narrative language, maybe new techniques for the camera.”
Meanwhile, Arancibia is interested in possibly moving beyond acting, telling THR: “I want to be a screenwriter.”
The Good Daughter made history at Tallinn by winning both the main competition and the audience awards. Its star and co-writers are thankful, with the latter sharing with THR: “We put everything we had into the film.”
