“Palma” emerges from a personal desire to establish a dialogue about death and mourning, the unconscious and the unspeakable. Walking alongside the main character, Sara, we see the individual process of grief, loss and how this character deals with the emptiness left by her mother’s death.

Through the protagonist’s initiation path, different levels of approach to the theme are introduced: spirituality served by esoterism, Christian rites of relationship with death contaminated by older pagan traditions.

I wanted to revive the universe of these ancestral rituals that have since been lost and which refer to an almost surreal dimension, because of their singularity: people spend the night on the floor in the deceased’s house, looking like lifeless figures; when preparing for the funeral, they speak directly to the deceased as if they were alive.

The surrealism of “Palma” is a narrative choice that is connected with a way of looking at art as an object of questioning reality. Through metaphors, the surreal aspects surprise viewers by bringing together two worlds, the real and the unreal. A metaphor is formed, which leads to rethinking reality itself.
The hands stand out as an aesthetic and narrative theme. We see Sara going through her grief, looking for answers through palmistry or hand reading. During this inner process, there is a sense of her own mortality that Sara seeks to obliterate by wearing gloves or by scraping her palm.

Despite the painful and lugubrious atmosphere, “Palma” also reveals the unusual and even tragico-comical side of death with the introduction of the mourners. An occupation, now extinct, in which the interveners were paid to mourn. This staged moment is a satirization of this rite, in which an exaggerated distinction, made through death and not life, is revealed through the glorification of the deceased.

The presence of Entrudo (pagan monsters in the forest) and its profane manifestations within the popular imagination enhance Sara’s fear, but there is also something liberating here, which continues with her running at the beach and then the revelation of her hand in the library.

In “Palma” there is a rite of passage as we can see in the last shot, in which Sara observes the palm of her hand and everything that contains it, light and darkness.