<\/p>\n
Olga lives alone in a vast Mexico City apartment block, on a strict routine and without attachments: she does sudoku, listens to her neighbours, swats flies. When money troubles force her to rent out a room, the man who moves in secretly brings his nine-year-old son with him. Cristian upends everything Olga has spent years arranging \u2014 bouncing a ball around the flat, slipping off to the hospital where his mother lies, trying to talk his way past reception. Slowly, and against both their wills, something forms between the boy and the stranger that rearranges both their lives.<\/p>\n
Fernando Eimbcke<\/strong> was born in 1970 and has been part of the front rank of Mexican filmmaking for over twenty years. His first feature, Duck Season<\/em> (Temporada de patos, 2004), already broke through: it screened in Critics’ Week at Cannes and won the Ariel Award for Best Film at home. Lake Tahoe<\/em> (2008) played in the Berlinale competition, where it took both the Alfred Bauer Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize; Club Sandwich<\/em> (2013) premiered in Toronto and won Best Director at San Sebasti\u00e1n. His most recent film, Olmo<\/em> (2025), was his first US production, made with Brad Pitt’s Plan B, and premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama section.<\/p>\n The same method holds that career together throughout: few characters, one or two locations, long static shots, and drama made out of hours of idleness. Flies<\/em> returns to it \u2014 along with the black-and-white images of his debut, shot here by Mar\u00eda Secco. Among the producers is Michel Franco, with whom Eimbcke began making short films in the 1990s; this film brought the two back together.<\/p>\n For all its spareness, the film doesn’t play for sadness. Seen from the boy’s point of view, the most pressing matter is not the hospital but an eight-bit arcade machine in the corner shop, and whether he’ll finally shoot down the UFO. Eimbcke has long been that rare director who films video games from the inside rather than from a moralising distance; here an arcade cabinet becomes the one place where a nine-year-old and a woman who lives for herself can meet.<\/p>\n The film premiered in the main competition of the 76th Berlinale, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It then went through the year’s major festivals \u2014 Karlovy Vary, Toronto, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Sarajevo, Melbourne, Sydney, New Horizons \u2014 and Mexico selected it as its submission for the Goya Award for Best Ibero-American Film. Critics have consistently singled out its simplicity: both Variety<\/em> and the Hollywood Reporter<\/em> write that it is precisely the film’s narrow means that make it disarmingly direct.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Olga lives alone in a vast Mexico City apartment block, on a strict routine and without attachments: she does sudoku, listens to her neighbours, swats flies. When money troubles force her to rent out a room, the man who moves in secretly brings his nine-year-old son with him. Cristian upends everything Olga has spent years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":35413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n