After winning three Gaudí awards and the Goya for best novel direction for A thief's daughter (2019), Belén Funes (Barcelona, ​​​​1984) premieres this Friday The Turtles, an expressive, layered drama about the relationship between a mother and daughter after the death of their husband and father, Julián, and the threat they face of eviction. Set between Barcelona and the Jaén countryside, Funes's second film crowns the Barcelona-born director. Does it give rise to a desire to talk about grief?

Delia's Andalusian sister-in-law (Antonia Zegers) explains the meaning of a photo hanging in her room: the people depicted are "Los Tortuga," the emigrants who left Jaén for Catalonia with everything loaded on them. In fact, Delia, of Chilean origin, married Julián, an Andalusian man she met in Barcelona and with whom she had a daughter, Anabel (Elvira Lara). But, despite the fact that Belén Funes's second feature film begins in Andalusia, with the entire family gathered for the oil painting festival and to remember Julián, who recently passed away, this is not a film that reconstructs one of the many still unexplained stories of the exiles from southern Spain to Catalonia.