Magical Girl

Carlos Vermut • 127 mins • Spain

Alicia, a terminally ill twelve-year old, dreams of wearing an outrageously expensive designer dress from her favourite Japanese anime figure: Magical Girl Yukiko. Her father Luis, an unemployed literature teacher, blinded with grief, wants to do everything to make his daughter’s last wish come true.

Carlos Vermut gained his reputation as a cult-hero after debuting with Diamond Flash in 2011, a film he made with an impressively low budget of €20.000. He uploaded the film on the VOD platform filmin.es and within a week it reached thousands of views.

Magical Girl is his second feature film and won all the top awards at the San Sebastian Film Festival last year. With the tragic events, pitch-black humor, sexual motives and chain of blackmail: this moody, dark film has all the ingredients to be a classic film noir. Showing us the eternal conflict of the human soul struggling against its enemies.

But Magical Girl is more than that. Human interactions form key points to the plot line and therefore the film is even referred to as Korean genre film exposing moral complexity. Highly intelligent and incredibly creative: you have never seen a film like Magical Girl before.