This week on Palomitas, we journey to the heart of rural Castile to explore Icíar Bollaín's compassionate and clear-eyed comedy-drama, Flores de otro mundo [Flowers from Another World] (1999) – with special guest Prof. Rosi Song, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Durham University.

The film follows three women – Patricia from the Dominican Republic, Milady from Cuba, and Mari Rosi from Bilbao – who arrive in a depopulated Spanish village as part of a ”women's caravan”, organised by local bachelors in search of wives and girlfriends. What unfolds is a tender, tense, and quietly radical portrait of love, loneliness, and the search for home in a Spain on the brink of profound social change.

We unpack:

• How Bollaín balances documentary realism with fiction to capture the human stories behind Spain's demographic shifts.

• The film's nuanced portrayal of migration through three very different women – international, internal, and in transit.

• Whether Patricia's story represents ”successful” integration, or something more complex: compromise, adaptation, and mutual transformation.

• How food, silence, and the vast Castilian landscape become characters in their own right.

• The film's legacy, twenty-five years on: does it still speak to debates about migration, belonging, and the España vacía/vaciada?

Scholarship cited in the episode:

Ballesteros, Isolina. Immigration Cinema in the New Europe. Intellect, 2015.

Corbalán, Ana. ”Cartografías de la otredad: Nuevo racismo en el cine español.” In Nuevas aproximaciones al cine hispánico, edited by Santiago-Juan Navarro and Joan Torres-Pou. Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 2011.

Deveny, Thomas. Migration in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema. Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Sánchez Noriega, José Luis. ”Viajes transformadores de personajes en el cine de Icíar Bollaín.” Quintana: Revista de Estudios do Departamento de Historia da Arte, no. 20, 1-11 (2021).

Santaolalla, Isabel. ”Body Matters: Immigrants in Recent Spanish, Italian and Greek Cinemas.” In European Cinema in Motion, edited by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg. Palgrave, 2010.

Marín, Karmentxu. ”'Caravana de mujeres' para los solteros de Plan.” El País, 1985.