Last week I went to see Sorogoyen's new film, El ser querido, starring Javier Bardem and Vicky Luengo, which is about a renowned and controversial film director who calls his daughter, an actress with a stalled career who earns her living working as a waitress and with whom he has no contact, to offer her a role in the new film he wants to shoot in the Sahara. It seems that when Valor sentimental, by Joachim Trier, was released last year, Sorogoyen's blood ran cold: the film, winner of the Cannes Jury Grand Prix, is about a renowned film director, Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who offers a role to his daughter Nora, with whom he has no relationship, for his new film project. I understand the fear.I will not write an article comparing both films, nor will I try to critique them; I just want to reflect on the fact that unites both titles in a more meaningful way. And forgive the spoiler, because one must start at the end: both Sorogoyen and Trier redeem the absent father. I mean: at the end of both films, repentant, sentimental, moved, and even shocked fathers appear to see their daughters there, acting so well, having turned that crazy project of filming together into a second chance that life has offered them. Both fathers are saved.Leaving the cinema, the first thing I thought about was what would have happened if instead of fathers they had been mothers. This was already explained very well by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz in Las abandonadoras: while an absent father who sees his children a couple of times a year and pays child support more or less regularly can come to be seen as a good parent, a mother who does the same is almost a criminal. How could a woman want to abandon her child? What kind of monstrosity is this? Maria Montessori, Joni Mitchell, Ingrid Bergman and so many others. The most interesting thing is that Gómez Urzaiz also reviews fictional mothers, such as Anna Karenina, Nora from A Doll's House or Carol by Patricia Highsmith, tracing a cultural archive of how we have imagined the mother who disappears. There is no redemption for Karenina, with her tragic suicide at the end. And as for Nora, with that final slam of the door, we applaud her for freeing herself without stopping ourselves from judging her. And faced with Carol, Gómez Urzaiz asks herself, with sincerity, how a mother can do that to her children.

With the permission of Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director most loved in France in recent times is surely Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Madrid, 1981), who just a few days ago received the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government and has triumphed in French cinemas with titles such as El reino or As bestas. The culmination of his love story with France is the participation in the Cannes competition of his new film, El ser querido, which premieres this Saturday both at the festival and in French cinemas, an unusual fact for a Spanish production that will not reach our country until August.