DIRECTOR: Maryam Touzani
STARRING: Carmen Maura, Marta Etura, Ahmed Boulane
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 56 minutes
LANGUAGE: Spanish, Arabic
PLOT: María Ángeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman living alone in Tangier, Morocco, leads a quiet life built on cherished routines. But her peaceful existence is disrupted when her daughter arrives from Madrid, intent on selling the apartment that has been her home for decades. Refusing to give up the place that holds her memories, María Ángeles fights to reclaim her space and possessions and in the process, unexpectedly rekindles her sense of love and sensuality.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Tangier, Morocco
To check out all previous submissions for Morocco, click HERE.
STARRING: Carmen Maura, Marta Etura, Ahmed Boulane
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 56 minutes
LANGUAGE: Spanish, Arabic
PLOT: María Ángeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman living alone in Tangier, Morocco, leads a quiet life built on cherished routines. But her peaceful existence is disrupted when her daughter arrives from Madrid, intent on selling the apartment that has been her home for decades. Refusing to give up the place that holds her memories, María Ángeles fights to reclaim her space and possessions and in the process, unexpectedly rekindles her sense of love and sensuality.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Tangier, Morocco
To check out all previous submissions for Morocco, click HERE.
FILM REVIEW:
(This review contains spoilers.)
“Half your friends are dead, the other half moved to Spain to be with their children."
Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga unfolds with quiet precision, offering a deeply intimate portrait of an aging woman caught between memory, belonging, and the inevitable passage of time. Set in the sun-soaked yet melancholic alleys of Tangier, the film follows María Ángeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman whose comfortable solitude is disrupted when her daughter returns from Madrid to sell the apartment she has called home for decades. What begins as a story about displacement soon expands into a profound exploration of independence, love, and the stubborn persistence of desire in old age. Touzani’s direction, marked by tenderness and restraint, transforms a simple premise into an emotionally layered meditation on identity and loss.
Through a delicate balance of realism and poetry, Calle Málaga captures the rhythms of María Ángeles’ daily life, the careful preparation of tea, the hum of distant conversations, the sea breeze filtering through open windows. These moments, seemingly mundane, carry immense emotional weight, revealing the texture of a woman’s interior world. The apartment itself becomes a living character: a space that shelters her past and resists erasure. Touzani’s lens lingers on small gestures, emphasizing the dignity of her protagonist and the quiet rebellion behind her refusal to leave. The film’s pacing mirrors María Ángeles’ emotional state, measured, reflective, yet pulsing with an undercurrent of tension as her world begins to collapse.
As the narrative unfolds, the arrival of a new and unexpected companion brings tenderness into María Ángeles’ life, rekindling a sense of vitality she believed long gone. Touzani approaches this late-blooming connection with remarkable sensitivity, neither romanticizing nor pitying her subject. Instead, she portrays love as a form of resistance, a declaration that one’s capacity for feeling and intimacy does not vanish with age. In this regard, Calle Málaga stands apart from typical narratives of aging, offering instead a luminous and compassionate vision of rebirth.
Calle Málaga is about reclaiming one’s place in a world eager to move on. Touzani weaves a quiet, universal truth into María Ángeles’ story: that home is not merely a physical space, but a repository of memory, identity, and emotional continuity. The film suggests that love, whether romantic, familial, or self-directed, can anchor us when everything else slips away. With subtle grace and profound emotional intelligence, Calle Málaga becomes a meditation on aging, resilience, and the enduring human need to belong.
(This review contains spoilers.)
“Half your friends are dead, the other half moved to Spain to be with their children."
Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga unfolds with quiet precision, offering a deeply intimate portrait of an aging woman caught between memory, belonging, and the inevitable passage of time. Set in the sun-soaked yet melancholic alleys of Tangier, the film follows María Ángeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman whose comfortable solitude is disrupted when her daughter returns from Madrid to sell the apartment she has called home for decades. What begins as a story about displacement soon expands into a profound exploration of independence, love, and the stubborn persistence of desire in old age. Touzani’s direction, marked by tenderness and restraint, transforms a simple premise into an emotionally layered meditation on identity and loss.
Through a delicate balance of realism and poetry, Calle Málaga captures the rhythms of María Ángeles’ daily life, the careful preparation of tea, the hum of distant conversations, the sea breeze filtering through open windows. These moments, seemingly mundane, carry immense emotional weight, revealing the texture of a woman’s interior world. The apartment itself becomes a living character: a space that shelters her past and resists erasure. Touzani’s lens lingers on small gestures, emphasizing the dignity of her protagonist and the quiet rebellion behind her refusal to leave. The film’s pacing mirrors María Ángeles’ emotional state, measured, reflective, yet pulsing with an undercurrent of tension as her world begins to collapse.
As the narrative unfolds, the arrival of a new and unexpected companion brings tenderness into María Ángeles’ life, rekindling a sense of vitality she believed long gone. Touzani approaches this late-blooming connection with remarkable sensitivity, neither romanticizing nor pitying her subject. Instead, she portrays love as a form of resistance, a declaration that one’s capacity for feeling and intimacy does not vanish with age. In this regard, Calle Málaga stands apart from typical narratives of aging, offering instead a luminous and compassionate vision of rebirth.
Calle Málaga is about reclaiming one’s place in a world eager to move on. Touzani weaves a quiet, universal truth into María Ángeles’ story: that home is not merely a physical space, but a repository of memory, identity, and emotional continuity. The film suggests that love, whether romantic, familial, or self-directed, can anchor us when everything else slips away. With subtle grace and profound emotional intelligence, Calle Málaga becomes a meditation on aging, resilience, and the enduring human need to belong.
