Ana Asensio Finds Mystery, Mischief and Moral Clarity in Goat Girl

Friday, June 19, 6:20 pm screening
followed by a Q&A with Director Ana Asensio and Larry Fassenden 
Cinema Village

In Goat Girl, childhood is not treated as innocent so much as unfinished — a strange, watchful state where adults explain the world badly, and children are left to discover the truth for themselves.

Directed by Ana Asensio, the film centers on eight-year-old Elena, who is preparing for her First Communion in 1988 Madrid while grieving the loss of her grandmother. Her world begins to shift when she befriends Serezade, a Roma girl who is rarely seen without her goat. What begins as a tender childhood friendship becomes something more unsettling and revealing, as Elena starts to question what she has been taught about class, faith, difference, and obedience.

Set on the outskirts of Madrid, Goat Girl renders girlhood with an eye for both wonder and danger. Its world is full of religious ritual, family rules, social codes and private sorrows — the sort of things children absorb before they can fully name them. Asensio uses Elena’s gaze to explore classism, racism, religion and emotional honesty without losing the film’s delicacy. The result is a coming-of-age story that moves between realism and fable, comedy and ache, with unusual tenderness.

For Asensio, a Spanish actress, screenwriter, director, and producer who has been based in New York for more than two decades, the film marks a deeply personal return to the textures of Spanish childhood. Born in Madrid, she trained as an actress in Spain before continuing her studies in New York, building a career across film, television, theater and independent cinema. That bicultural path has shaped her work, which often centers women navigating identity, survival, belonging and exclusion.

Before moving into feature filmmaking, Asensio established herself as a performer on stage and screen, producing and starring in three award-winning one-woman shows that played Off-Broadway and toured internationally. Her feature directorial debut, Most Beautiful Island — which she wrote, directed, produced and starred in — premiered at SXSW in 2017, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. A psychological thriller about an undocumented immigrant fighting to survive in New York, the film earned critical acclaim, an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the John Cassavetes Award, a MoMA screening, and international distribution.

It also gave Asensio the kind of calling-card debut filmmakers dream of. The Hollywood Reporter praised it as “a highly original spin on the immigrant survival story,” while IndieWire called it “an utterly spellbinding debut.” Since then, the film has continued to gather attention, appearing on lists from The New York Times, Vulture, and Rotten Tomatoes as a notable work of modern independent horror.

With Goat Girl, which premiered in 2025 at the Málaga Film Festival, Asensio turns from urban dread to childhood memory, though the film is hardly soft-edged. Spanish critics have responded to the film’s visual identity and moral charge. Javier Ocaña of El País noted Asensio’s “good taste for locations,” “notable treatment of light” and “effective symbolisms,” while Juan Pando of Fotogramas praised how the film uses “the innocent and always curious gaze of a young girl” to expose the absurd conventions adults accept as normal.

Already collecting attention on the festival circuit, Goat Girl has also received a nomination for Best European Children’s Film. But its appeal is not limited to younger audiences. 

Like the best childhood stories, it understands that children notice everything — especially the things adults hope they will miss.