“De la Rosa is not interested in reducing his characters to their pain but showing how they continue on with aspirations and hope.”

Playing in this year’s Berlinale Panorama section is Iván & Hadoum, a Spanish film directed by Ian de la Rosa. The film tells the story of Iván, a trans man, and Hadoum, a Spanish Moroccan woman, who fall in love while working at an industrial greenhouse. As they face opposition from their families and coworkers, the film unfolds as a contemporary Romeo-and-Juliet-like story of intimacy under pressure from the stressors outside of the couple’s control. However, as more than a romance, the film becomes about how Iván slowly realizes he does not need to become the man his family expects him to be in order to survive or be loved. With this first feature, de la Rosa examines how identity, politics, and love can coexist on screen, while establishing himself as a director deeply attentive to how identity shapes life.

Iván (played tremendously with vulnerability and depth by Silver Chicón) works at the greenhouse and, thanks to family connections, is positioned to become a line manager and eventually a warehouse supervisor. His father co-owned the greenhouse and was a close friend of the other greenhouse owner, Manuel (Nico Montoya), and that relationship still structures Iván’s future. The promotion promises stability and money, something Iván’s family desperately wants. His mother, sister, niece, and nephew all live together in a cramped house, and they imagine that Iván’s upward mobility will finally allow them to move into a nicer apartment. The film is attentive to how career aspiration is tied to consumerism, to square footage, to privacy, and to the ability to breathe.

Despite Iván’s ambition, the warehouse is already unstable. Rumors circulate about the greenhouse being sold to German investors, and an audit looms that will determine whether the sale goes through. The workers fear layoffs, restructuring, and stricter work conditions. 

One night, Iván goes out to a bar and encounters his co-worker Hadoum (Herminia Loh) singing karaoke. Hadoum remembers Iván from school, from before his transition. Her song is cut short because she’s singing in her native Moroccan language rather than Spanish, and the bartender shuts her down because the song is “boring”. Iván pushes back, and the scene becomes charged quickly. He is called a “hybrid,” an insult that lands with cruelty.  It’s a word that is meant to mark him as not quite human and not quite acceptable, but Iván shrugs it off.

Afterward, Iván, Hadoum, and two friends go to the beach, where both couples make love. The scene between Iván and Hadoum is handled with striking tenderness. Iván hesitates, unsure how to show his body, uncertain whether desire will survive exposure. Hadoum reassures him without grand gestures or speeches. The intimacy here is quiet and earned. It’s not about an erotic display of passion but instead about trust in intimacy and how that can transform into emotion. De la Rosa lets these moments breathe which allows desire to exist without turning Iván’s desire into a problem to be solved.

As their relationship deepens, Hadoum becomes increasingly vocal about labor conditions at the greenhouse and emerges as one of the leaders opposing the German buyout. Her activism is not abstract; it grows from lived experience. Earlier, she fainted at work and felt the management did nothing to properly care for her afterward. The film links bodily vulnerability to political consciousness and how being treated as lesser clarifies how expendable a person can really be.

This puts Iván in an impossible position. On one side is Hadoum, the first person who seems to love him without shame or conditions. On the other side is Manuel, his boss and gatekeeper to financial security. And behind both stands his family, whose hopes are pinned on his promotion. The film does not reduce this conflict to individual moral failure. Iván’s dilemma is complex as it examines an entanglement of loyalty, survival, love, race, and labor politics.

The film is political in obvious ways with union pressure, foreign ownership, and labor exploitation, but its deeper politics lie in how it frames Iván’s existence. His being trans is not treated as a problem to be solved or something to be fixed. It is simply part of who he is. In one of the film’s most touching and beautiful moments, Iván says that what he loves about Hadoum is that she is not ashamed to be with him. That line carries enormous weight. It names how often love is determined by public perception and by the fear of being seen loving the “wrong” person. For many people, including myself, everyday life comes down to finding people who will stand next to you without caring about what you look like or what your immutable traits are. Iván & Hadoum is political because it insists on that dignity, because it refuses to turn its marginalized characters into symbols rather than people.

This focus on identity is consistent with de la Rosa’s earlier work. In his short film Farrucas, he followed teenagers navigating Moroccan and Spanish identities in a marginalized suburb of Almería. In the anthology project I’m Being Me, he explored lives shaped by gender and sexuality. Here, as in those earlier works, Iván and Hadoum are not framed through what they lack but through their longing for stability, for love, and for a future that does not require erasure.  It’s truly meaningful and beautiful to find a director who so deeply cares for his characters. 

Iván & Hadoum does not dwell in despair. It’s not a film about the suffering of its characters. Instead, it’s a film about hope and a world in which all people can love and be loved without having society’s preconceived notions win out. With the film, de la Rosa is not interested in reducing his characters to their pain but showing how they continue on with aspirations and hope.

(c) Image copyright – Lluís Tudela