After her finely judged love-triangle drama The Blue Kaftan, Maryam Touzani returns to Australian screens with a warm but clear-eyed portrait of an elderly widow forced to fight for her independence when her apartment is sold out from under her.

Carmen Maura, a towering presence in Spanish cinema, plays Maria Angeles, a lifelong resident of Tangier’s Spanish quarter. After 40 years, the neighbourhood’s rhythms are second nature. That stability is abruptly stripped away when her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) – mid-divorce and buckling under Madrid rents – arrives with an ultimatum: relocate to Spain, a country Maria has never lived in, or move into a local nursing home.

She chooses the latter, but Touzani wastes little time exposing its suffocating routines. When an overbearing hairdresser insists on cutting her hair – whether she likes it or not – Maria walks out, returning to her now-empty flat and the life she refuses to relinquish.

Carmen Maura in Calle Malága

Living quietly as a squatter, she begins to rebuild, buying back her possessions piece by piece from a taciturn secondhand dealer, Abslam (Ahmed Boulane). But with prospective buyers traipsing through the apartment, her fragile...