Synopsis
In rural Spain, ten-year-old Pablo loves spending time at his granny’s countryside home, playing with his younger sister Alba and his best friend Martín.
But everything changes when Martín pressures him to betray his family, leaving Pablo to question where he truly belongs.
Director Biography – Fernando Reinaldos
Fernando (Lorca, 1992) is a film producer, screenwriter and director. After years working as a playwright in Madrid, and after receiving numerous awards for his short plays, he moved to New York to study screenwriting and film directing at Columbia University, thanks to a scholarship from La Caixa.
His first short film ‘Blackout’ was selected for the Cartagena International Film Festival, among others. His second short film ‘Fin’ received the CIMA Award for Best Filmmaker at the Elche International Independent Film Festival, the Lucía Award for Best Fiction Short Film at the Gibara International Film Festival in Cuba, and Second Prize for Best Short Film at the Madroño Awards of the Madrid City Council, among others. It has also been selected for more than forty film festivals around the world, including the Festival Cine Solidario de Guadalajara, the FanCineGay de Extremadura, BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, or AMOR Festival Internacional de Cine LGBT de Chile, among others.
His latest work, the short film ‘Leo’ will premiere at Reeling: Chicago’s LGBTQ+ Festival in the United States in autumn 2023, and he has just finished shooting ‘Gallina’, a very personal story filmed entirely in his native Lorca. Fernando is already working on the development of his first feature film, which he hopes to shoot in 2025.
As a queer child, I remember the constant feeling of being trapped between two worlds: my feminine and masculine sides were always in conflict. Many times I tried to figure out where I belonged, without understanding why I had to make a choice at all. The warmth of my supportive family was not always enough to help me stand up to the harshness of the toxic masculinity outside. At that time, my deep admiration for my best friend led me to make choices against my instincts, betraying the special bond I shared with my dearest ones.
Gallina is my attempt to better understand that time in my life. The day when I came to understand something irreversible about myself and the world around me. When my silence began to shape the person I would become. The same silence that many queer children carry to protect themselves from being seen.
Through Pablo’s story, I wanted to examine how toxic masculinity shapes a boy’s identity in today’s world, and to explore the cost of remaining silent in the face of everyday violence. The silence that takes over at the end of the film is the same silence that, heartbreakingly, has become a defining feature of our time.