General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Gordos

Gordos (international title: Fat People) is a 2009 Spanish dramatic comedy written and directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, structured as five interwoven stories around a group therapy session for people with obesity-related problems. It was his second feature film, following the multi-award-winning debut Azuloscurocasinegro (2006), and it premiered at the Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori) section of the 2009 Venice Film Festival before opening in Spain on 11 September 2009.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original / international title	Gordos / Fat People
Country and year	Spain, 2009¹
Director and writer	Daniel Sánchez Arévalo¹
Principal cast	Antonio de la Torre, Roberto Enríquez, Verónica Sánchez, Raúl Arévalo, Pilar Castro, Leticia Herrero, Fernando Albizu, María Morales, Adam Jezierski¹
Festival / release	Venice Days, Venice 2009; Spanish theatrical release 11 September 2009 through Alta Classics²^•⁴
Runtime	110 minutes per Cineuropa; some Spanish listings give 118 minutes¹^•⁴
Major award	Goya for Best Supporting Actor, Raúl Arévalo, XXIV Premios Goya 2010⁵
Box office	Worldwide gross reported as $2,685,252 by Kinoafisha; another database lists $1,990,753⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film is an ensemble piece whose common nexus is a group therapy session for people with problems related to obesity. Publicity materials stated that the participants were not there to lose weight but to find the reasons for their overweight and to understand why they were unhappy with their bodies.³^•⁸

The five stories described by Cineuropa's review give the outline of the ensemble: a promiscuous, impulsive television sales presenter (Antonio de la Torre) who almost kills his partner and, crushed by guilt, moves in with the partner's wife; a female executive who gains a great deal of weight during her husband's long absence; a plump teenager with obese parents and a skinny twin brother who is bullied at school and at home; a young religious couple, she fat and he thin, who have never had sex despite a long relationship; and the therapist himself (Roberto Enríquez), who helps his patients accept themselves but cannot bear that his own girlfriend (Verónica Sánchez) has put on weight during a much-desired but complicated pregnancy.²

Structure. The narrative is framed by a weight-loss product sold by Antonio de la Torre's character through a teleshopping program, and the film is divided into four parts corresponding to the four golden rules his product proposes for slimming down.⁹ Critics disagreed on the device: the Fancine review called the sectioning more of a pretext than an organizing principle, while the Spanish blog Cinecia took the four-part method as the film's effective backbone.⁹^•¹⁰

Themes

Sánchez Arévalo described the film himself as "a dramatic comedy about excess," starring "physically and emotionally fat characters who, to cover their inner emptiness, decide to swallow," and said he wanted to show "the fears that keep fattening" everyone.¹¹ The Cineuropa review reads the obesity as a metaphor for emotional overload: the baggage people are incapable of expressing or accepting, and the preoccupation with appearance that makes people live a sham; the film's stated conclusion is that what matters is being free, rejecting labels, and being comfortable with oneself whether one looks fat or thin.² A 2024 RTVE retrospective piece described the film as ahead of its time in addressing gordofobia, anti-fat prejudice.¹²

Academic attention followed. A paper by MT Icart Isern and MC Icart Isern of the University of Barcelona analyzed the film's six obese characters and argued that its "plot character" structure, a story focused on obesity itself, makes it usable in the classroom as a resource for discussing the problem.¹³ A review in Medicina y Cine noted that the film presents most obesity typologies and their consequences in an intelligent, sensitive and honest way.¹⁴

Production and the physical transformations

The shoot was unusually demanding. Some actors had to change their weight radically for the roles; Antonio de la Torre gained more than 30 kilos for his part, and the filming was divided into two blocks separated by a break of several months so the actors' weight changes could be captured on camera.¹⁵ The director confirmed in a 2009 interview with El País that Antonio, Verónica, Leticia, and María underwent the fattening and slimming processes under the control of a nutritionist, Angela Quintas, along with physical trainers, and that the actors' health was the first priority.¹⁶ Cineuropa counted four actors who had to gain weight "due to script requirements."²

A Spanish Ministry of Culture production record adds a further detail: the film was shot over the course of a year, and the director described the screenplay as open, with scenes written according to how much weight the actors had been able to gain or lose for their characters.¹⁷

Credits. The film was produced by Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas (60 percent) and Filmanova Invest (40 percent), with the participation of TVE and Canal+ España. Producers were José Antonio Félez and Antón Reixa; Juan Carlos Gómez was the cinematographer, Pascal Gaigne composed the score, and David Pinillos and Nacho Ruiz Capillas edited. Domestic distribution was handled by Alta Classics.⁵^•⁴ Cineuropa lists Imagina International Sales as the sales agent and further international release dates in the Netherlands, Estonia, Belgium, Germany, and Poland in 2010.¹

Reception

At Venice the film received a lengthy standing ovation at its Venice Days screening, according to Cineuropa's festival coverage.¹⁸ Spanish critics were divided. Carlos Boyero of El País called it "an uneven but also unsettling film, a rarity with strange charm, with a tone closer to the somber than the humorous"; M. Torreiro in Fotogramas gave four stars and called it "as uneven as it is stimulating"; Javier Ocaña, also of El País, saw a narrative incontinence that alternated between ingenuity, cliché, and the grotesque.¹⁹ The Fancine review judged the result "stimulating but uneven," baroque where the first film had been economical, though it praised the director's tender, unprejudiced approach to a subject filmmakers rarely choose.⁹ Blog critics were warmer: Cinecia called it the best Spanish film of 2009 to that date and awarded it a top grade, crediting the director's sense of humor for keeping the material from becoming just another Spanish drama.¹⁰

Aggregated scores reflect the split. IMDb shows 6.5/10 from about 3,200 votes, with Spain providing the largest share of ratings; FilmAffinity lists 6.2; Rotten Tomatoes' audience Popcornmeter stood at 71 percent with an average rating of 3.6 out of 5 from 250-plus ratings; Kinoafisha aggregates 6.4.²⁰^•¹⁹^•²¹^•⁶

Awards

At the XXIV Goya Awards in 2010 Raúl Arévalo won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Álex.⁵ IMDb's awards listing records four further Goya nominations for the film: Antonio de la Torre for Best Lead Actor, Pilar Castro and Verónica Sánchez for Best Supporting Actress, and Fernando Albizu for Best New Actor, plus a Cinema Writers Circle (CEC) nomination for Verónica Sánchez as Best Supporting Actress.²² FilmAffinity additionally records a 2009 Forqué nomination for Leticia Herrero as Best Actress and a 2010 Mestre Mateo award for Best Art Direction among four nominations.¹⁹ Sánchez Arévalo later confirmed he was a candidate for the 2010 Goya for Best Original Screenplay for the film.²³

Place in Sánchez Arévalo's career

The shoot left its mark on the director. In a 2011 RTVE interview he said that in June 2009, having just finished Gordos, a very intense and dramatic film, he was in a hard professional and emotional moment and wrote the lighter comedy Primos as a way of actively healing those wounds.²⁴ In a 2009 El País readers' chat he framed the film as a deliberate risk compared with the tightly controlled Azuloscurocasinegro: it needed more excessive characters and stories, with the comedy more comedic and the drama more dramatic.¹⁶ The film was later made available on RTVE Play, which renewed public attention to it in 2024.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2009 to 2010 › Released in 2009

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

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