General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Carmen y Lola

Carmen y Lola is a 2018 Spanish drama written and directed by Arantxa Echevarría, telling the love story of two Roma teenage girls on the outskirts of Madrid who face rejection from their families and community.¹ It was Echevarría's first feature film and premiered in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors' Fortnight) at the Cannes Film Festival; its trailer announced that she was the first Spanish woman director selected for that section.² The film opened in Spanish cinemas on 7 September 2018 and won two Goya Awards, for Best New Director and Best Supporting Actress.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Arantxa Echevarría, her feature debut¹
Festival premiere	Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Cannes 2018; also competed for the Caméra d'Or for best first feature²
Spanish release	7 September 2018³
Runtime	105 minutes⁴
Cast	Zaira Romero (Lola), Rosy Rodríguez (Carmen), Moreno Borja, Rafaela León, and Carolina Yuste, the only professional actor in the cast¹
Goya Awards (2019)	2 wins from 8 nominations: Best New Director and Best Supporting Actress (Carolina Yuste)⁴
Critical reception	90% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 21 reviews⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Carmen is a Roma teenager living on the outskirts of Madrid. Like every other Roma woman in her community, she is destined for a life repeated generation after generation: marrying young and raising as many children as possible. She is engaged to a Roma boy and expects to marry when they turn 17. One day she meets Lola, an uncommon Roma girl who dreams of going to university, draws bird graffiti, and explores lesbian chat rooms at a local internet café. Carmen quickly develops a complicity with Lola and discovers a world that leads both to be rejected by their families.²^•⁶

The Frameline festival synopsis describes the setting as an insular Roma community where early marriage is the norm and girls are not supposed to smoke, have cell phones, or date. Despite the obstacles, including Carmen's own internalized homophobia, the two keep returning to each other as the dangers of discovery mount.⁶

Production and casting

Non-professional cast. Echevarría insisted on being faithful to the community she portrayed, noting that very few actors exist in the Roma world because its members rarely dare to follow that path. The casting process extended over six months, during which the team saw more than 1,000 Roma candidates in street markets, suburbs, associations, and on the street. Only one character is played by a professional actor; the other roughly 150 performers had no prior experience before a camera.¹

Rosy Rodríguez, cast as Carmen, was candidate number 897 and appeared when the team was close to giving up. She was 17, had married at 15 and left her husband six months later, which made her considered "badly married" within the community. Zaira Romero, cast as Lola, was a 16-year-old who had never been in front of a camera. Moreno Borja, who played Paco, later left his job as a security guard to pursue acting after the film.¹

The film was produced by TVTEC Servicios Audiovisuales with the support of Orange España, the Comunidad de Madrid, and the ICAA (Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales), distributed in Spain by Super 8 Distribución with international sales by Latido Films.¹ In an interview, Echevarría said she asked the roughly 400 Roma extras that if they did not agree with the film's subject matter, they should not take part.⁷

Reception and awards

At Cannes the film was selected for the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and competed for the Caméra d'Or.² Critics frequently highlighted the ethnographic realism of the Roma world and the natural performances of the unknown cast; the Spanish trade press noted the film's "verismo etnográfico" (ethnographic realism: unvarnished, truthful depiction of real communities) and its casting of first-time actors.³ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 90% Tomatometer from 21 reviews, with Variety calling it "a pleasant but linear, single-issue movie, which is compassionate and deeply felt" and Screen International praising its "vibrantly realised sense of place" and work with non-professional actors.⁵

At the 2019 Goya Awards the film received eight nominations, including Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best New Director, and won two: Best New Director for Echevarría and Best Supporting Actress for Carolina Yuste, who played Paqui and was the only professional actress in a cast otherwise drawn from the Roma community.⁴^•⁸

Controversy and interpretation

The film's release was contested from two directions. The Asociación de Gitanas Feministas por la Diversidad accused the director of barring the association from preview screenings and from the social debate, and of presenting herself in declarations as a spokesperson for Roma women with a "paternalistic feminism".⁹ Film critic María Guerra later summarized the dispute: the film was "very controversial at the time because the Roma community said it had a tourist's gaze," while critics noted that the director "saw what can be seen from outside." Guerra argued that despite this, the film was important because it asked families what would happen if their daughter were a lesbian, and had wide resonance in non-Roma ("paya") society and for lesbian representation.¹⁰

Academic writing has placed the film in the context of what film scholar Paul Smith calls "the new queer visibility": Carmen and Lola are shown as regular Roma teenagers whose visual coding articulates their Romani ethnicity rather than their lesbian romance, avoiding classical tropes of lesbian representation such as the suicidal lesbian figure, associations of lesbian desire with deviancy, or the masculinized "butch" stereotype.¹¹ A study in the Journal of Lesbian Studies described the film as taking a groundbreaking approach to intersectionality and lesbian identity, contextualizing a lesbian coming-of-age story within a conservative and homophobic environment in which lesbianism finds no space.¹²

Legacy

Echevarría followed the film with La familia perfecta and later La infiltrada (2024), and critics reviewing her career have noted that although Carmen y Lola was not a box-office success, it drew attention and won her the Goya for Best New Director.⁷^•¹³ The film has been credited by Spanish critics with changing how lesbian characters were portrayed on screen, moving away from endings in which, as Guerra put it, lesbians "ended up sad, ugly, and with horrible fates".¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026