THE DINNER GUEST

• Susana Abaitua
• Ginés García Millán
• Adriana Ozores

After devoting herself for 14 years to other tasks (including her job as Minister of Culture), Ángeles González-Sinde returns to filmmaking as director with the adaptation of the saddest autobiographic novel written by Gabriela Ybarra, whose grandfather was kidnapped and murdered by the terrorist group ETA in Bilbao in 1977. Her parents had hidden that fact from her for many years and she only found out in 2011 while helping her mother to cope with cancer. An intimate, distressing and sorrowful film that appeals to people’s hearts, narrated with considerable moderation and restraint so as not to harm the feelings of a family marked by tragedy. Structured and encompassing two time periods, the film proves that intimacy is always more important than the surrounding political reality and that one cannot live in the present and make plans for the future without confronting and coming to terms with the past. A brilliant performance by the two actresses that play the role of the daughter and mother in this fiction movie: Susana Abaitua and Adriana Ozores.

Having had to confront her mother’s lethal cancer, Iciar becomes aware of the tragic kidnapping and murder of her grandfather at the hands of ETA in 1977. Thanks to Iciar’s efforts to bring to light the family memory, she and her father will get back together and find common ground in a new way of looking at the past in order to face the future and go on living.