Flies

Some directors need an earthquake to tell you something. Fernando Eimbcke has spent twenty years proving the opposite: give him a small flat, two people who can't stand each other and enough time for them to look at one another properly. 'Flies' is his fifth feature, after 'Temporada de patos', 'Lake Tahoe', 'Club Sándwich' and 'Olmo'. It turned up first in competition at the 2026 Berlinale, where it took the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and it is shot entirely in black and white.

Olga is past fifty and lives alone in a huge housing complex in Mexico City, directly opposite a hospital. She kills flies with a spray can, does sudoku on an ageing computer and rents rooms to the relatives of patients to make ends meet. Her conditions are plain: no using the kitchen, timed trips to the bathroom and, above all, nobody is to tell her anything about the sick relative. She wants her lodgers the way she wants flies, at a distance and not for long.

Tulio comes to the capital to be near his wife, who is being treated across the road, and smuggles his son Cristian into the room without telling the landlady. The boy is nine, he isn't allowed in to see his mother and he spends his hours out on the pavement, glued to an old arcade machine where he shoots down invading ships without missing one. When the father has to leave for work out of town, the woman and the child are left alone in the flat. And it turns out she can play too.

Teresa Sánchez carries the film as Olga, with first timer Bastian Escobar beside her, Hugo Ramírez as the father and Enrique Arreola as a hospital worker. Eimbcke wrote it with Vanesa Garnica, María Secco shot it and Camilo Lara wrote the score. It was filmed in the Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán, the housing estate known as the CUPA, across from Mexico City's 20 de Noviembre hospital, and the director produced it with Michel Franco and Eréndira Núñez Larios as a Mexican and Spanish co-production. British audiences met it at the London Film Festival in October 2026. Reviews have been warm, and Mexico picked it to run for the Goya for best Ibero-American film.

• Drama
• Comedy