working in fruitful collaboration with cinematographer Greenberg, Asensio succeeds in creating an intimate, unstable world around Luciana, without any risk of the film becoming a vanity piece
Most Beautiful Island is a character study of survival in a capitalistic, hierarchical world that is not completely bereft of humanity. Arsenio gives Luciana a true inner life, and even the antagonists make deep emotional sense
a short, stressful, and utterly spellbinding debut that transforms the immigrant experience into the stuff of an early Polanski psychodrama, Ana Asensio's "Most Beautiful Island" is a worthy winner of the SXSW Grand Jury Prize