This isn’t a list of films exclusively about friendship. It’s a list of films we’d watch with our friends. Because they’re about desire, guilt, first times, impossible decisions, and all those things that are easier to talk about after watching a film together.
These five films explore friendship, first experiences, guilt, desire, growing up, and finding your place in the world. Above all, they’re about the conversations you only have with the people who truly know you: your friends.
What happens when your best friend starts to change… and you’re still not sure whether you want to change too? Set in an English boarding school, Extra Geography follows Minna and Flic, two inseparable teenagers navigating that strange moment when growing up means beginning to grow apart. Based on a short story by Rose Tremain and directed by Molly Manners, it’s a delicate, funny, and remarkably perceptive portrait of female friendship, jealousy, first emotions, and the moment you realise that loving a friend also means letting her change. Following its Sundance premiere, it has become one of the year’s breakout discoveries.
We all have one summer that changed us forever. Judith Godrèche adapts one of Annie Ernaux’s most personal novels, looking back to reconstruct the memory of a first love, desire, shame, and the woman we eventually become. Premiering in Cannes, it’s a film about memory, but also about the stories we tell ourselves about our past as the years go by. The perfect film to leave the cinema and end up sharing your own stories.
Charli XCX makes her debut as a leading actress in a film that has already generated plenty of buzz since its premiere. Erupcja is a tense, emotionally charged portrait of a generation, where relationships, impulsive decisions, and the search for belonging erupt like a volcano on the verge of exploding. One of those films that will almost certainly have you debating what you would have done in the same situation.
After surviving a sexual assault, director and actress Bárbara Maestranza decides to transform her legal battle into a stage play. The result is an intimate and courageous documentary that reflects on sexual violence, healing, and the transformative power of art. Far from sensationalist, Sucia has become one of the documentaries of the year, winning the Audience Award at the Málaga Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Sheffield DocFest.
It all began with a question. Director Marta Durán Lozano asked other women whether they had gone through the same experience she had: having an abortion as a teenager. She received more than a hundred anonymous testimonies. Las culpables grows out of these silenced voices, turning them into an intimate and deeply moving film about guilt, shame, and the right to tell your own story. A project that had already shown its promise when it won an award at the Mallorca Talents Lab, and one that confirms the arrival of an essential new voice in Spanish cinema.