At its centre is Esteban Mart\u00ednez (Javier Bardem)<\/em>, a prestigious Spanish film director based in New York, winner of two Academy Awards<\/em> and transformed into one of those figures whose importance seems always to precede his presence. He returns to Spain to shoot a new film and decides to offer the leading role to his daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo)<\/em>, an actress and, above all, a woman he hasn’t seen for thirteen years. What might initially appear to be an attempt at reconciliation soon becomes something far more ambiguous. Esteban<\/em> wants his daughter back, but he intends to do so on his own terms, within his own film, on his own territory and using precisely the thing he knows how to control best: cinema.<\/p>\n Sorogoyen<\/em> and Pe\u00f1a<\/em> don’t seem particularly interested in creating a monster. And therein lies much of the intelligence of El ser querido<\/em>. Esteban<\/em> can be seductive, funny, generous, magnetic and, at times, even vulnerable. He can also be profoundly selfish. The contradiction matters because the film is not simply asking whether we are looking at a good or a bad man, but rather to what extent we have learnt to tolerate certain behaviours when they are accompanied by talent, success or power.<\/p>\n An entire ecosystem is often built around certain creative figures to make their work possible. Someone organises, waits, cares, understands, gives things up, forgives or absorbs the consequences while the creator continues creating. For far too long, culture has romanticised this dynamic through the figure of the genius: the exceptional individual for whom the rules governing everybody else\u2019s lives somehow seem too small.<\/p>\n El ser querido<\/em> introduces a far more interesting question: what remains outside the frame when we look at an extraordinary career? Behind Esteban<\/em>\u2019s awards, films and recognition lies a biography also built upon absences and people who have had to reorganise their lives around his decisions. His success does not disappear because of this, but it ceases to be an exclusively individual story.<\/p>\n The film feels particularly contemporary because it questions our fascination with powerful personalities without falling into the comfort of turning them into caricatures. The problem is not simply that there are people capable of taking up all the space, but that for decades we have created professional, familial and cultural structures that encouraged them to do precisely that.<\/p>\n If Esteban<\/em> takes up space, Emilia<\/em> has learnt to protect hers. Victoria Luengo<\/em> builds the character with extraordinary restraint, allowing a look, a silence or the slightest shift in expression to reveal far more than any explanation could. Opposite her, Bardem<\/em> uses precisely what makes Esteban<\/em> so difficult to reject: his enormous capacity for seduction.<\/p>\n Their relationship works because El ser querido<\/em> understands something essential about family conflicts: there is rarely a single version of the past. We remember from the position we occupied, from what we needed to understand and also from what we have had to tell ourselves in order to move on.<\/p>\n For Esteban<\/em>, certain decisions belong to another time and can be explained by circumstance. For Emilia<\/em>, their consequences remain part of the present. Between them lies a distance that cannot simply be resolved by reconstructing the facts, because knowing what happened doesn’t necessarily mean sharing an understanding of what it meant.<\/p>\n This is where one of the film\u2019s central themes emerges: who has the right to construct the narrative. It is a particularly significant question when one of the characters is, precisely, a film director. Esteban<\/em> has spent his entire life deciding where to place the camera, what enters the frame, what remains outside it and how a story should be interpreted. But his daughter refuses to become yet another character in a narrative written by him.<\/p>\n Sorogoyen<\/em> uses the shooting of Esteban<\/em>\u2019s film to continually blur the boundaries between representation, memory and reality. The film being made within El ser querido<\/em>, entitled Desierto<\/em>, is set in the Spanish Sahara and transforms the landscapes of Fuerteventura into colonial territory. This story, seemingly removed from the family conflict, eventually establishes a dialogue with it through a shared idea: abandonment.<\/p>\n Spain abandoned Western Sahara; Esteban<\/em> abandoned his daughter. The point is not to establish an equivalence between these two realities, but to observe how a single word can operate across entirely different scales and force us to consider the responsibility of the person who leaves and the consequences that remain for the person left behind.<\/p>\n The decision also allows El ser querido<\/em> to reflect on the very act of filmmaking. Film shoots appear as strange organisms in which, for a few weeks, temporary families, hierarchies, affections and dependencies are constructed around a work that inevitably places the director at its centre. Sorogoyen<\/em> observes this world from within and, in a way, observes himself too.<\/p>\n There is something particularly suggestive about a director constructing a film around another director whose power contaminates his relationships. Sorogoyen<\/em> has acknowledged that his own way of directing is the polar opposite of his protagonist\u2019s, but the question raised by the film extends beyond Esteban<\/em>: what does it mean to exercise authority within a creative process, and how far can demands be pushed when the ultimate objective is to make a great work?<\/p>\n Much of El ser querido<\/em> depends on our believing in the relationship between its protagonists, and Bardem<\/em> and Luengo<\/em> make that tension feel physical. He possesses an enormous presence, but the film never allows that presence to devour Emilia<\/em>. Luengo<\/em> doesn’t need to compete in intensity; she constructs her character from somewhere else entirely, ensuring that the daughter\u2019s resistance carries as much weight as the father\u2019s magnetism.<\/p>\n Bardem<\/em> also embraces one of the character\u2019s most interesting risks: making us understand why someone like Esteban<\/em> can be irresistible without asking us to absolve him. Esteban<\/em> knows how to make people laugh, how to enthuse a crew, how to recognise talent and how to make films. That is precisely what makes him so much more unsettling. Being brilliant in one area of life doesn’t automatically make anyone a good person in all the others.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ccmagazine.es\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Cartel_Elserquerido-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\nTalent as an excuse<\/h6>\n
The film questions our fascination with powerful personalities without falling into the comfort of turning them into caricatures.<\/h2>\n
Fathers, daughters and versions of the past<\/h6>\n
Cinema within cinema<\/h6>\n
Sorogoyen uses the shooting of Esteban\u2019s film to continually blur the boundaries between representation, memory and reality.<\/h2>\n
Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo<\/h6>\n