My Dearest Señorita on Netflix: a mother who knew her daughter was intersex for 25 years

Adela teaches catechism every week in a parish in Pamplona. She is in her twenties, an only child, the daughter of a family that owns a small antique shop on a quiet street. She stands in front of the children and tells them, week after week, that the body is a vessel given by God for a clear and ordered purpose. She does not know that her mother and the doctors who delivered her in 1976 sat in a hospital room and decided what her body would be allowed to be. She does not know that the catechism she has been teaching contains, by careful design, no clause for what she actually is.

The premise of Mi querida señorita is not the discovery — that arrives, and the film does not hide it. The premise is the agreement that preceded it. Adela is intersex, and the people who raised her have known since the day she was born. They raised her as a girl, they steered her toward catechism work, they watched her grow into a young woman whose entire moral language was given to her by a Church that has a clause for sin and a clause for grace and no clause for what she would learn about herself in her twenty-fifth year. The film calls this what it is — a contract signed by a family, on a child’s behalf, before the child could read.

The decision to set the film in 1999 is doing more work than the marketing suggests. There is no internet for a girl in provincial Spain to search her own body. There is no public language for intersex as a category distinct from the medical-religious word hermafroditismo still in use in Spanish hospitals at the end of the twentieth century. There is no marriage equality — Spain will not legalize it for another six years — and no national gender-recognition law. The parish is the default moral framework. Alana S. Portero, whose novel La mala costumbre established her as one of the writers Spain trusts on bodies and silence, writes the screenplay. Director Fernando González Molina, who knows how to film provincial Spanish weather as moral atmosphere, lets the late-Franco-generation interiors carry the argument. The antique shop is the film’s central metaphor, not because the script says so but because the camera spends so much time inside it. Every object on the shelves came from someone else’s family. None of the objects know their own history. The shop is what Adela grew up inside, and the film makes the visual grammar do the work that dialogue cannot.

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The casting is the decision the 1972 original could not make. Jaime de Armiñán’s Mi querida señorita, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, was made under late-Franco censorship. José Luis López Vázquez, a cisgender star, played the protagonist; the medical alibi was a smuggling operation that allowed the film to say something the regime would not have permitted in plainer language. Armiñán used the cover the period gave him with extraordinary skill, and the result was one of the most quietly subversive Spanish films of the early 1970s. Portero takes the alibi away. Elisabeth Martínez, an intersex woman in her on-screen debut, plays Adela. The film’s risk lives in that decision. There was no veteran intersex Spanish actress to cast. The career did not exist because Spain did not let it exist. The criticism that has arrived from some Málaga reviewers — that Martínez’s debut performance is uneven, that the film leans into didacticism — has to be measured against the alternative the film refused to take. Portero and González Molina did not want a polished cisgender star delivering a moving turn. The unevenness is the cost of the decision, and the decision is the film.

The film is set twenty-seven years in the past, but it lands in 2026. Spain is, as Mi querida señorita releases, in the middle of an unresolved argument about intersex infants and surgical “normalization.” The 2023 expansion of trans rights left the intersex question medically open. Children are still operated on in their first months in many Spanish hospitals, on parental consent alone, to make ambiguous bodies fit binary categories. By going back to 1999, Portero performs a maneuver the contemporary frame could not. She lets the audience watch a generation of parents make exactly the decision that a generation of contemporary parents are still making, and she lets the consequence walk into the room as a twenty-five-year-old woman who has spent her life teaching catechism inside a body she was not allowed to know. The film is a 2026 argument disguised as a period piece. A viewer in Bilbao or Berlin or Buenos Aires watches Adela’s mother in 1999 and recognizes the same hospital corridors, the same parental fear, the same ethical shortcut still being taken now.

What the film inherits from Almodóvar is the grammar — provincial Spanish family, Catholic mother, queerness as a fact rather than a plot. What it breaks from him on is the resolution. Almodóvar offers transcendence: the queer protagonist makes it to Madrid, builds chosen family, escapes provincial constraint into self-creation. Adela also makes it to Madrid; the film moves there in its second half. Anna Castillo’s Isabel, a lesbian physiotherapist whose arrival is the chain reaction the synopsis describes, opens the door to the city and to a vocabulary the parish never offered. Paco León’s Padre José María, a gay priest whose role in Adela’s discovery is the film’s most surprising piece of casting against type, treats her question as a real one rather than a danger. Manu Ríos, Eneko Sagardoy, Lola Rodríguez, and Nagore Aranburu fill out the world that opens up. María Galiana, Spain’s most legible television grandmother through Cuéntame, plays Adelina, the family elder whose presence the audience reads instantly as the household’s ethical voice — and whose relationship to the secret is the film’s most painful note. But Madrid does not fix the wound. The film refuses the Almodóvar exit. Portero honors Armiñán’s 1972 ending, which left its protagonist inside the question rather than on either side of it.

What does a person owe a family that loved her by lying to her about her own body? The film does not answer. Its most patient scenes are the ones in which Adela’s mother is not a villain and Adela is not a hero. They sit across from each other inside a doctrine neither of them wrote, both of them shaped by the same parish, the same medical handbooks, the same silence that ran through Spanish provincial Catholicism for two generations. The catechism Adela has spent her life teaching has a clause for sin and a clause for grace. It does not have a clause for the specific arithmetic of being lied to by a mother who believed she was protecting you. Forgiveness is not earned in the film, and refusal is not earned either. Adela is left, at the end, inside the question — not because the film is afraid of resolving it, but because the question is what she has been given, and the film respects her enough to leave it intact.

My Dearest Señorita arrives on Netflix globally on May 1 after a limited Spanish theatrical run by Tripictures that opened on April 17, and a world premiere in the official competition of the 29th Málaga Film Festival on March 8. The film was directed by Fernando González Molina and written by Alana S. Portero, freely adapting the 1972 screenplay by Jaime de Armiñán and José Luis Borau. Suma Content — Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, with Andrea Herrera Catalá as executive producer — produced for Netflix. The original score is by Álex de Lucas and Zahara, with an original song by Zahara composed for the film. Runtime is 113 minutes. The cast is led by Elisabeth Martínez as Adela in her on-screen debut, alongside Anna Castillo as Isabel, Paco León as Padre José María, Nagore Aranburu as Cruz, Manu Ríos as Gato, Eneko Sagardoy as Santiago, Lola Rodríguez as Angela, and María Galiana as Adelina. The 1972 Mi querida señorita was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The 2026 film is its tribute, its rewrite, and its argument with itself — the version Spain finally let speak in its own language.

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