General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Innocence

The Innocence (Catalan: La innocència; Spanish: La inocencia) is a 2019 Spanish coming-of-age drama and the debut feature of director Lucía Alemany, about a 15-year-old girl in a small Mediterranean town who becomes pregnant after a secret summer relationship with an older boyfriend.¹^•² It premiered in the New Directors section of the 67th San Sebastián International Film Festival and reached Spanish cinemas on 10 January 2020.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	La inocencia (Catalan: La innocència)¹
Director and writers	Lucía Alemany's first feature; screenplay by Alemany and Laia Soler Aragonés¹
Cast	Carmen Arrufat (Lis), Laia Marull, Sergi López, Joel Bosqued¹
Runtime and release	92–93 minutes; premiered at San Sebastián 2019, released in Spain 10 January 2020¹
Production	Turanga Films and Un Capricho de Producciones, with backing from ICEC, IVC, Movistar+, TV3, À Punt Media, RTVE, and ICAA¹^•³
Basis	Strongly autobiographical, drawn from Alemany's adolescence in Traiguera, Castellón²
Awards	Two Goya nominations (Best New Actress, Best Original Song); seven Gaudí nominations; wins at Toulouse Cinespaña 2020 and an Honorable Mention at Munich 2021⁴^•²

Spoilers

Plot and themes

Lis, played by Carmen Arrufat in her first film role, dreams of leaving her small town to study at a circus academy in Barcelona. During the summer she spends her days with her friends and flirts with Néstor (Joel Bosqued), a boyfriend several years older. The town's lack of privacy and its neighbors' constant gossip force her to keep the relationship secret from her parents, an authoritarian father and a mother preoccupied with other people's opinions. As the local festival ends, she discovers she is pregnant, and the relationship changes her life.¹^•⁵

Alemany framed the film as a portrait of fading patriarchal authority. "The film tries to show that the patriarchal authority is already beginning to fade away while it becomes an object of mockery," she said at the Valladolid festival in October 2019, while acknowledging that attitudes like those of the father and the boyfriend once "made me live with fear."⁵ A scholarly survey of unplanned pregnancy in contemporary Spanish cinema places the film among works that present abortion as legal and safe while problematizing the protagonist's situation: as a minor afraid to tell her parents, Lis first resorts to alternative solutions, and the story is staged around isolation and secrecy.⁶

Autobiographical origins and production

A personal story. Alemany, born in Traiguera, Castellón, in 1985, studied at the ESCAC film school in Catalonia. At 17 she fell in love during a summer, became pregnant, and had an abortion; "I didn't tell anyone," she told El País. The story waited years to become a film: on 8 June 2015, her 30th birthday, producers sat down to read the script, and production followed. It developed from her 2015 short 14 años y un día and was the first project to emerge from The Screen, the incubator program of the ECAM film school in Madrid.⁷

The film was shot largely in Alemany's home town of Traiguera and nearby Sant Mateu in Castellón, with additional days in La Sénia and Ulldecona in Tarragona; filming ran from 6 August 2018 to 7 September 2019 per the Spanish film database ICAA, and local residents appeared as extras.⁸^•⁹ The dialogue is in Catalan, in the Valencian variety of the region.³^•¹⁰

Improvisation within a script. The cast, which included experienced actors Sergi López, Laia Marull, and Joel Bosqued, spent several weeks rehearsing and adapting the script to their own experiences. "Although we knew it was an improvisation, we kept working on the script at all times," Alemany said; producers Belén Sánchez and Lina Badenes admitted the improvisation initially frightened them but called it a risk worth taking.⁵ Alemany has described her approach as grounded in cinéma vérité, minimizing the line between reality and fiction to draw maximum truth from the performers.¹¹

Release and reception

After its San Sebastián premiere in the New Directors section, the film screened in the Spanish Cinema section of the 64th Seminci (Valladolid) in October 2019 and opened commercially in Spain on 10 January 2020, distributed by Filmax.¹^•⁵ It was one of the first films to benefit from The Screen support program, and Cineuropa's profile notes that it "shimmers with truth."¹

Critical response was positive. Rotten Tomatoes records a 100% approval rating from six reviews.³ Spanish critics praised its freshness and honesty: Mikel Zorrilla of Espinof wrote that many similar films exist "but none have the freshness that Lucía Alemany brings," and Fotogramas found "nothing new here, but it all sounds honest, considerate, and is made with joy."³ Fotogramas also called it "a note-perfect and authentic portrayal of small-town life on the east coast of Spain."²

Awards

The film received 14 wins and 28 nominations overall according to IMDb.⁴ At the 2020 Goya Awards it was nominated for Best New Actress (Carmen Arrufat) and Best Original Song ("Allí en la arena" by Toni M. Mir).⁴ It was nominated for seven Gaudí Awards, including Best Director and Best Catalan Language Film, and won Best Supporting Actress there.² At Toulouse Cinespaña 2020 it won Best Actress and Best Director, and at the Munich Film Festival 2021 it took the CineVision Award Honorable Mention, with the jury citing an "impressive film by Lucía Alemany about the universal state of confinement and captivity in which many women continue to live."²^•⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2010 onward

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

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