“Like motherhood, fatherhood requires and deserves to be told in its complexity. And with them, all masculinities.” The speaker is Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, the director of On Sundays, one of the movies of the season. In his drama, the father of the protagonist, a teenager with the soul of a novice, is a man who plays with filial respect to hide a well of selfishness. Another of the fathers who have appeared on screens in recent months, men absent or contrite in their relationships with their offspring, male figures who in their erroneous actions also harbor humanity.
There are many, many films of this new wave, which moves away from the usual cinema for parents (the one in which Liam Neeson rescues his daughter from the hands of perfidious kidnappers) and which comes after a few years in which the directors finally found a loophole to show in theaters the new and old motherhoods, the joys, the problems and the depressions that come with being a mother.
Yes in the series Jakarta Diego San José has drawn Joserra, a defeated coach who projects on a badminton player a paternal relationship incapable of maintaining with his own offspring. In the cinema, absent fathers are the driving forces of Jay Kelly, Valor sentimental, Roofman, The Phoenician plot, On Sundays, Hamnet, The Mastermind o Maspalomas. There is still a reflection of the usual bad parenting in titles like Frankenstein o Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. And yes, many of those absent fathers become contrite fathers in the aforementioned films and in other examples such as The fight, Sirât, One battle after another o Rental Family (another man trying to silence, style Jakarta, their ghosts from the past vicariously). There are also admirable parents, who against all odds strive to move the emotional family relationship forward, like the one embodied by Álvaro Cervantes in Deaf
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Trailer for ‘Sirât’
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Trailer for ‘Sundays’
There will be even more reflections on this: on March 6 it premieres in Spain My father’s shadow, one of the British sensations of the season; at Sundance he won Josephine, in which a child witnesses a rape in a park in San Francisco and this atrocity affects her relationship with her father (Channing Tatum); in The loved one Rodrigo Sorogoyen will show how a film director (Javier Bardem) builds bridges with his daughter, an unsuccessful actress (Victoria Luengo), and in anemone, newcomer Ronan Day-Lewis brings back his father, Daniel Day-Lewis, for the performance to talk about family ties and conflicts between parents, children and siblings.
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Tráiler de ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’
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‘Maspalomas’ trailer.
Ruiz de Azúa points out that on numerous occasions “making films is dreaming of the world in which you want to live.” So sometimes “idealizations” of men that he would like to have by his side are projected onto the characters, or “it serves to exorcise” bad behaviors that he observes in society. Oliver Laxe feels something similar: “Deep down Sirât My intention to, in the future, be a father and the challenges that will entail is also palpitating.” Ruiz de Azúa also finds his creative driving force in the emotional, artistic and family challenges: “It is necessary when talking about motherhood not to forget fatherhood. “I’m not saying they’re linked, but I’m interested in them talking.”
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‘Hamnet’ trailer
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Trailer for ‘Jay Kelly’
The Norwegian Joachim Trier, director of Valor sentimental, a film with obvious Bergmanian echoes (Ingmar Bergman never scored as a good parent), he told EL PAÍS: “This is the first film I made having two children. I have always been accompanied by a fear, that of failing as a father, and that is why this filming was very symbolic for me, because I don’t want to be Borg [el director al que vida Stellan Skarsgård]. We filmed in Oslo, and that’s how I managed to go home every night; that was one of the great personal achievements of this film,” thus silencing his regrets.
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Trailer for ‘Rental Family: rental family’
At the Venice festival, where it was presented One battle after another, Leonardo DiCaprio defended his character, Bob Ferguson, underlining his perseverance: “His true heroism is not in the armed struggle, but in the fact that he simply continues to advance relentlessly to protect his daughter.” He’s lucky: his character is one of the few cinematic fathers of 2025-2026 who completes his reconciliation process successfully.
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‘Frankenstein’ Trailer
Resist, accompany and understand a teenage daughter, overcoming the void created by the absence of a mother. shows it One battle after another and also the canary The fight, by José Ángel Alayón, currently in theaters. This Thursday, Alayón pointed out: “I was interested in telling how this lack of motherhood is faced in a man who is unable to communicate. That he surely related to society through his wife, and that he only achieves his own voice in the Canarian struggle.”
It is there, in those training sessions and in those close bodies, where that father and his teenage daughter will create a communication channel. “The body is its shell in the face of the lack of words. The clash of the shells causes sparks. In The fight I maintain that it is very difficult to change, so if the only thing that family has is the struggle and its physicality to try to understand each other, to build a meeting point, then let’s all learn to use the elements we have to search for happiness.” And he confesses about his two actors: “I made the casting with great care. Both Yasmina Estupiñán [la adolescente] as Tomasín Padrón [el luchador] They had some specific urgencies and absences that I thought were useful for their characters. That sadness and that need for another are on the screen.”
Alayón was a father during the production of The fight, and for this reason he underlined the feeling of “change of axis” of his protagonist. To the BritishNigerian Akinola Davies Jr., 40-year-old video creator, who makes his feature-length fiction debut with My father’s shadow, The axis change is caused by the fact that his father died when he was 20 months old. In his film, two children accompany their father on a day in Lagos (capital of Nigeria), a very special day when the hope that democracy will arrive is silenced by a coup d’état. From London, on Wednesday, by video call, Davies explains: “It is important to talk about masculinity, because I think there are many different masculinities. And therefore, about fatherhood. And about imperfections.” Although he is the youngest of four brothers, Davies was given his first name by his father. In the cinema, the filmmaker has also baptized his younger brother as Akinola, and has exorcised his demons: “I never had a conversation with my older brothers about my father. This film replaces that conversation for me. It’s not perfect, it’s not like he was, but now I have it on the screen.”
