In El mal padre, a family reunion turns into a reckoning. Three adult children return to the beach house where they grew up. Directed by Roberto Bueso, the film is part of the Official Selection at the 74th San Sebastián Film Festival and competes for the Golden Shell. It had its world premiere on September 22, 2026, in the Official Competition, and its team took part in the festival’s press events.
Eduard Fernández plays Santiago Balmes, a celebrated writer and academic who gathers his children before Christmas and asks them to spend several days together. The invitation brings old memories and unresolved grievances back into the house. What begins as a shared stay becomes a reassessment of how children judge their parents when they view family history from a new generational perspective.
That is where the film’s basic tension lies. Roberto Bueso presents fatherhood as a relationship that changes over time, not as a fixed moral category. The basic idea is simple: children may judge their parents too harshly by the standards of the present. They may understand the limits of that certainty only when they have children of their own.
The project grew out of Bueso’s life. After his father died and he learned he would become the father of a girl a few months later, the director began asking himself what kind of father he would be and what kind of father he had had. Screenwriter Óscar Díaz Cruz was going through something similar. Their collaboration brought two generations with different ideas about fatherhood face to face.
The film draws on personal experience, but does not remain autobiographical. Bueso and Díaz Cruz examine which lessons from the previous generation have lost their force and which may still be worth keeping. The story unfolds around everything a family says after putting off a difficult conversation for years.
Information from EFE’s festival coverage, the film was shot in the Valencian Community. Its release in Spanish cinemas is scheduled for November 20, 2026.
Fernández describes Santiago as an unpleasant father. He also talks about the balance between silence and words, and between humor and tragedy. That balance defines the film’s tone. The character is not reduced to a single accusation: pauses and contradictions make the family reunion feel recognizable. EFE and Cadena SER coverage has also noted the combination of a charismatic but emotionally harsh father with a drama shaped by absence, humor and grief.
That dark tone marks a shift in Bueso’s filmography. Several Spanish outlets have described El mal padre as his most mature and somber work, in contrast with the warmer tone of his earlier films. San Sebastián’s official program also lists Cristina Plazas, Francesco Carril, Adam Jezierski and Meritxell Calvo in the cast, alongside Fernández.
El mal padre arrives in San Sebastián as a competition film and a sign of Atresmedia Cine’s direction. The company is using the festival to present its latest season, after securing more than half of the Spanish cinema market share. The film is also part of Atresmedia Cine’s slate of major releases for 2026-2027. That lineup also includes La bola negra, Karateka, Las ciegas hormigas, El confidente and Caer de pie, a film about mental health.
The lineup covers different subjects instead of repeating a single formula. El mal padre gives that strategy its most intimate face. Its conflict does not depend on external spectacle, but on the distance between parents and their children. With the family home and a generational dispute at its center, the film gives Atresmedia Cine a direct way to connect Spanish cinema with an everyday experience.
That is why its presentation in San Sebastián is more than another showcase. El mal padre builds its ambition around a conflict that can sustain an intimate drama and public discussion without losing the details of family life. Atresmedia Cine’s strongest bet is not the scale of the story, but its precision: a father brings his children home and discovers that the past is still sitting at the table.
