Goat Girl

Coming to terms with the craziness of today’s world can be a difficult, maddening undertaking for many of us adults. So imagine how innately confusing it can be for someone looking at it from a child’s perspective, particularly for a youngster who is impressionable, astute and curious and who hungers for the truth (or some semblance of it). When looking at an existence pervasively replete with qualities like rigidity, prejudice, indifference, deception, cruelty, conventionality, hypocrisy, death, religion, unassailable faith and unquestioned mystery, not to mention grown-ups who willingly tolerate such traits, it’s no wonder that a child can be perplexed and unsure of what to believe. And that can lead to the development and embrace of erroneous, shallow or misguided perceptions. Such is the case for eight-year-old Elena (Alessandra González) as she grows up in Madrid in 1988 (a time, ironically, when the world was far less complicated than it is today). She’s naturally curious about her world but often thoroughly confused by it, especially when she asks for answers from her quarrelsome, often seemingly uncaring parents (Lorena López, Pablo Pereira), who rarely provide adequate answers and frequently imply that they might be better off without her. This all comes at a time when Elena struggles to deal with the recent death of her beloved, free-thinking grandmother (Gloria Munóz), her parents’ refusal to let her become friends with a visiting genial gypsy girl, Serezade (Juncal Fernández), and preparation for her upcoming First Communion, a rite of passage for which she feels like she’s receiving inadequate guidance from her inflexible, condescending yet hypocritical priest (Enrique Villén). Because of this, Elena’s often drawn to unconventional (some would say “heretical”) thinking, a seed that had been planted in her consciousness by her abuela. At the same time, though, she’s not so sold on her own ideas that she’s willing to completely abandon Roman Catholicism,...