By Valerie Milano & Robert St. Martin
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 12/30/25 – Fresh from TIFF is director Maryam Touzani, Calle Malaga (Tunisia, 2025), which has been selected as the opening film of the Palm Springs International Film Festival on Friday, January 2, 2026. Tunisian filmmaker Touzani based the main character of Maria in part on her own Spanish grandmother, and she chose as her lead Carmen Maura – a great actress best known to American audiences for her work in Pedro Almodóvar movies like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdownand Volver. Calle Malaga is the story of a Spanish woman living in Tangier whose quiet life is threatened when her daughter arrives to sell her apartment. This third feature of director Maryam Touzani, Calle Malaga strikes chords similar to her acclaimed sophomore feature The Blue Caftan in its exploration of the romantic, domestic life of someone well past middle-age.
Calle Malaga opens with title cards explaining to the audience the history of Tangier’s Spanish population: How, as Spain fell to fascism under Francisco Franco’s rule in the 1930s people fled to the Northwest Moroccan city of Tangiers, and a community of Spanish speakers blossomed and grew over the decades. This information provides a context for the story, but the stand-out performance of Carmen Maura is what is best about the film. Carmen Maura makes it obvious that her persona as Maria Angeles adores her quiet, content life in this city where she grew up. She enjoys making her way through the streets of her Tangiers neighborhood, shopping for groceries and warmly greeting her neighbors. When Maria’s daughter Clara (Marta Etura) arrives to visit her, she learns that she needs to sell the family home. Maria must either go with to be with her daughter in Madrid or live the remainder of her life in a nursing home.
Maria is a wonderfully textured character, at turns flinty and cold and vivacious and funny, and Maura is adept at embodying all sides to this woman. However, the movie around her proves a lot less interesting than its main character. Calle Malaga introduces the threat on Maria’s house as a tragedy before quickly pivoting to a more cheery, sentimental story, one in which the woman finds community and even love through the hardship. Crafty and resistant, Maria agrees to go to the retirement center and let Clara put the house on the market and return to her family in Madrid.
Clara is thinly rendered as an ungrateful child and an obstacle for her mother. She just went through a divorce. She’s struggling financially and needs the money to buy a new home for her kids. Her strained relationship with her mother has little nuance, and the unsatisfying, abrupt ending that leaves the two still at odds proves curiously sour for an otherwise gentle movie.
With her daughter off her back, she fakes a trip to see her to leave the center and heads back to squat in her unoccupied former home, eventually teaming up with a young neighbor to host football-viewing parties in the space as a way to scrounge up money. It also helps her buy back her old furniture from handsome antiques dealer Abslam (Ahmed Boulane), with whom she sparks a tentative romance.
The romantic subplot proves the most charming thread Calle Malaga has to offer, thanks to Maura and Boulane’s performances. There’s a wistful sense of longing between them even before things turn explicitly romantic, and for a relatively tame and breezy film it does get genuinely hot in its depiction of their relationship. In other areas, however, the script from Touzani and her husband and producer Nabil Ayouch falters in the way it fills out the people surrounding Maria. Her best friend Josefena (María Alfonsa Rosso), a nun who has taken a vow of silence, is more a device through which Maria can spew her feelings and inner thoughts than a fully-formed person.
There’s little sense of what her life in this city, as a Spanish woman around mostly Moroccans, looks like. Despite the film’s introductory text, most of Calle Malaga could happen in any city in the world. Calle Malaga is Morocco’s submission for consideration for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. A crowd-pleaser, the film received the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival and also at TIFF. This likeable movie has two screenings at different venues on January 2, 2026 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival: Palm Springs Cultural Center 1, at 6:30 PM (Sold-out, stand-by only); Palm Spring High School, also at 6:30 PM, followed Opening Night Party ($135) at the Palm Springs Air Museum, 745 N Gene Autry Trail, Palm Springs, CA 92262: Event Time: 8:30 PM – 11:30 PM.
