Madre amadísima (2008)

While dressing and adorning an image of the Virgin for the procession, Alfredo, a middle-aged gay Andalusian, confesses to her and tells her about his life. He speaks of his childhood, marked by an aggressive, absent father who abused his mother, and of the special relationship he has always had with her. He tells her about an incident that happened when he was six, during a stormy night: he tried to defend his mother from the beating she was receiving from his father, who also tried to hit him. Since then, this has left him terrified of storms, and he has never been able to learn the Lord’s Prayer properly. He recounts his lonely adolescence, when people in his village singled him out for being gay; his first love and subsequent disappointment with Javi; and how he met his only friend in the village, Titanlux, who introduced him to the gay scene of the time. He always stays by his mother’s side and leaves his village only to endure military service in the final years of the Franco regime, where he meets another great friend, Girasol. Alfredo asks the Virgin to heal his elderly mother, but she dies before she can see her son’s work in the procession. After his mother’s death, Alfredo can no longer find refuge in her bed during the next storm, so he runs to the altar of his Virgin and curls up at her feet.