Exclusive Clip: Emergency Fun(d) in Valentina Maurel’s ‘Forever Your Maternal Animal – 2026 Cannes

With her body of work, Franco-Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel has explored adolescence, female desire, social alienation and fractured family dynamics through a raw, darkly comic lens, and with Forever Your Maternal Animal further digs into the malaise of who and where are the grown-ups in the room. After showcasing a pair of of short films in Cannes with Lucía en el limbo (2019) and Les Chenilles (2023), she returns to the Croisette a short time after launching her feature debut I Have Electric Dreams at 2022’s Locarno Film Festival. In the sequence, Elsa (the older sister) quasi reprimands her sister Amalia for being fiscally irresponsible and in a way represents the emotional debits and withdrawals when she faxes her fractured family. The Un Certain Regard selected Forever Your Maternal Animal will have its world premiere on Saturday the 16th.