While homosexuality has gotten more acceptance now, exclusion still happens, more so if said queer person isn’t white. Carmen and Lola depicts two women who fall in love, and it takes on a familiar secret relationship storyline we’ve seen in other queer films, but rather than just take the familiar plot, make the leads Romani, and call it a day, the film instead focuses on how the things that keeps them apart are the very same mechanisms that the community created for their people to survive. It’s fitting that director Arantxa Echevarría depicts this through naturalistic shots and casting non-professional actors, because it makes Carmen y Lola a much more honest depiction of what it means to love in an intolerant community.

Yes, yes, Carmen does hurt Lola initially when she first rejects her, and it will be dismaying to see her fling some of the same homophobic ideas that other people would have said in their community. But it makes sense for the context– Carmen was, after all, engaged, and part of the reason why she says these things is internalized homophobia.