After years of silence and distance, a renowned director and his daughter—an actress striving to make her mark—find themselves working on the same film.
What begins as a professional opportunity evolves into an unavoidable emotional confrontation: on set, long-buried secrets, deep-seated resentments, and unhealed wounds surface, forcing both of them to come to terms with an unresolved past and the fragile bond that connects them.
"Feverish, unpredictable, expansive. A film about “making movies” that serves as an exorcism for a fraught relationship between a father and his daughter. Another extraordinary work from the Spanish director. [...] "El ser querido" is, above all, a film about love—with cinema acting as a tool to reach it, and to remind us just how arduous the process of rebuilding and rediscovering the “loved one” can be. Through a dusty, toxic backstage environment, Sorogoyen uncovers the essence of life and art, while simultaneously capturing their magnificent elusiveness. He leaves paths, nuances, and obsessions open-ended; he sets his characters free after having confined them within a magnificent cinematic psychotherapy. And he manages to leave—in the off-screen space, “beyond the film” itself—everything our unconscious needs to remain tethered, once again, to cinema and its enduring, residual necessity". (Carlo Valeri)
