46 CIFF Film Review: 'Calle Malaga' Exhibits Tender Portrait of Memory, Home, & Generational Distance

As part of the 2025 Cairo International Film Festival, the Moroccan–Spanish film Calle Malaga received a long, warm round of applause from the audience following its special screening. 

Shown to a fully packed theatre and competing in the festival’s international competition, the film was welcomed with admiration and emotional engagement from viewers who were deeply moved by its intimate storytelling.

Directed by Maryam Touzani, the film marks another strong entry in her growing cinematic career and continues her focus on nuanced character portraits rooted in emotional realism.

Calle Malaga tells the story of Ángeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman living alone in the coastal city of Tangier. Her days unfold in quiet routine, slow, familiar, and filled with the comforting details of a life long lived. 

This tranquility is disrupted when her daughter arrives from Madrid with plans to sell the apartment that has been the mother’s home for decades.

Despite Ángeles’ calm but firm resolve to stay, her daughter pushes for practical solutions, hoping to address her own financial pressures by selling the property. 

What follows is a subtle and deeply emotional struggle between two women who love each other, yet live in two different emotional and psychological worlds.

The film beautifully contrasts the mother’s world, a nostalgic, cosmopolitan Tangier that feels almost utopian, with the daughter’s reality of modern life: fast-paced, stressful, and economically demanding.

Through carefully framed visuals, the film highlights Ángeles’ attachment to the objects and memories that shape her sense of self: old furniture, a dusty turntable, classic Spanish songs, and the rituals of cooking and preserving her home atmosphere

These items are more than possessions; they represent identity, continuity, and belonging. 

In contrast, her daughter exists in a dystopia of daily survival, bills, and endless responsibilities. 

This emotional clash is at the heart of the film: Should we sympathize with the mother who simply wants to hold on to the small world that makes her feel alive? Or with the daughter who has tried to offer practical solutions, only to run up against her mother’s refusal to let go?

One of Calle Malaga’s most striking strengths is its respect for viewers’ intelligence.

Touzani does not force conclusions or moral judgments. 

Instead, she allows the audience to experience the emotional discomfort and humanity of the situation.

Even the ending is deliberately ambiguous. The final scenes hint that Ángeles may finally leave Tangier with her daughter, but instead of confirmation, we see her lingering gaze at the glowing city lights. 

The look suggests farewell, but also resistance, memory, and possibly doubt. The film leaves it for audiences to interpret the direction of her life, just as real life rarely gives clear answers.

Calle Malaga is a beautifully crafted and emotionally textured film that explores aging, belonging, and the emotional weight of home. 

Through delicate performances and restrained direction, it paints a moving portrait of women from two generations trying to understand each other across the divides of memory, time, and reality.

Warmly received at the Cairo International Film Festival, the film stands out as a thoughtful, tender reflection on what it means to hold on, and what it costs to let go.