There are still some unlikely spaces in the cities.There is a house in Barcelona, in the Gràcia neighborhood, which has a garden full of trees and plants and in the background sculptures surrounded by tiles. María, a 35-year-old Argentinian, recently separated from her partner, and her daughter Isabel, a six-year-old Catalan who is starting school, live there through some black hole in the rents. They are visited by Iara, sister of one and aunt of the other, and several of their friends. As we watch María and Isabel interact with their loved ones, the film sensibly explores the interior and exterior spaces that make up those relationships.

La escuela del bosque

The Argentine competition winner, Gonzalo Castro’s Invernadero (Winter House), offers a stylistically elegant if overlong contemplation of the experimental one-armed Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, a famed prankster who here engages with his daughter and friends (all fictional characters) in an interrogation of biography (itself a central conceit in Bellatín’s fiction).