Mailin (LUXFILMFEST)

..María Silvia Esteve, 89 min, 2025 - Argentina, France, Romania
A bedtime story turns into a haunting avant-garde nightmare as Mailin confronts her past for the sake of her daughter’s childhood. Over years of collaboration, director María Silvia Esteve followed Mailin Gobbo while she and many other women sought justice for the sexual abuse they endured at the hands of a Catholic priest and family friend. Blending documentary and storytelling, Mailin draws on home movies, archival material, and courtroom audio to build an aesthetically innovative portrait of memory and survival. María Silvia Esteve foregrounds Mailin’s own agency in the storytelling, allowing survival to emerge not as a matter of endurance but as an active reclamation of the past. A formally mesmerizing and urgent film that moves deftly between reportage and visual art.