TIFF 2026: ‘Nosotros’ Finds Tenderness in a City Built to Wear People Down

Romero has just had sex with a woman he’s attracted to. The food they ordered has just arrived, and somehow a game console enters the equation too. So what does he do? He starts playing.

It’s funny, but it also tells you a lot about the man Jozef Coxaj plays in Joaquín Ruano’s “Nosotros.” Romero is already a husband and father, though he won’t be completely honest about that when he meets Nubia (Lola Vásquez) in Guatemala City. He has left his Indigenous community in the highlands hoping that a few months of work as a security guard will help him pay off his tuk-tuk and relieve some of the pressure back home. Still, there’s something boyish about him that responsibility hasn’t quite managed to knock out.

Waiting for his shift to start one day, Romero wanders into an arcade and becomes absorbed in a shooting game. Nubia notices him and pays for a round. That’s more or less how their courtship begins: with an arcade gun, a shy man who doesn’t say much, and a woman who has already decided she’d like to know him better.

Ruano gets plenty from the physical contrast between his leads. Coxaj is relatively short and compact, while Vásquez has an imposing height and presence. Once Romero and Nubia become intimate, there are moments when the dynamic between them almost acquires a maternal quality without quite turning into one. Nubia seems more settled in herself, or at least more practiced at knowing what she wants. Romero can be so impulsive that you start wondering whether adulthood has simply happened around him while he wasn’t paying attention. Even after sex, give him a controller and apparently that’s enough to redirect his priorities.

Two People Who Don’t Want the Same Future

Nubia wants companionship with some permanence to it. She jokes about not wanting to live alone, die in an accident, and have the neighborhood discover her only once the smell becomes unbearable. A friend asks whether she’s ready to get her heart broken, and Nubia answers with another joke about getting her ass broken too. Vásquez delivers it casually, but there’s history sitting underneath the humor. Nubia has been disappointed before. She knows enough about men to recognize the possibility that Romero could become another one.

Meanwhile, Romero doesn’t think that far ahead. He’s very good at whatever is happening right now, which helps explain both his attraction to Nubia and the lies he tells her. He can be sweet and genuinely happy around her while compartmentalizing a whole other life somewhere beyond the city. I can understand viewers who find him difficult to sympathize with. He cheats, lies, avoids responsibility, and repeatedly does himself no favors. At times, “Nosotros” seems more interested in observing his arrested development than really opening it up.

I felt some of that frustration too. There’s enough in Romero to suggest a young man trapped between family obligation, money, Indigenous identity, masculine expectations, and his own desire to run away for a little while, but the movie only goes so far into any of it. He tells himself this city job is temporary. Three months, make some money, pay for the tuk-tuk, go home. Then Nubia gives him something else to stay for, even if he doesn’t seem capable of imagining what staying might actually require.

Coxaj makes these contradictions believable. Romero can be maddening without becoming cruel, immature without turning into a joke. There’s a quietness to him that makes people project things onto him, Nubia included, while Coxaj lets us see just enough uncertainty underneath. You root for the relationship even while suspecting there’s no version of it that can remain untouched by everything Romero hasn’t told her.

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Desire Without the Usual Storytelling

I appreciated even more what “Nosotros” doesn’t do with Nubia.

Her transness affects the world around her, particularly the way Romero’s fellow guards talk about him and police his masculinity, but Ruano doesn’t build the romance around revelation, explanation, or the usual narrative machinery that turns a trans character into an issue to be discussed. Nubia likes Romero. Romero likes Nubia. They flirt, eat, have sex, fool around, drive through the city, and enjoy being wanted.

It brought me back somewhat to “Warla,” a Philippine film that I saw at Cinemalaya last year, and to the larger problem of how often trans characters arrive onscreen already carrying whatever social argument the filmmaker wants them to represent.

In Ruano’s hands, however, Nubia gets to be horny, funny, lonely, wary, affectionate. She’s aware of danger without being defined by it. I only wish we spent more time with her.

That’s where my main reservation about “Nosotros” becomes a little ironic. The film has plenty going on beneath its 79 minutes: machismo, transphobia, Indigenous identity, economic displacement, organized violence, class difference, urban alienation, language. Yet I still came away wanting more emotionally. Vásquez is so good that every additional glimpse of Nubia suggests another dimension the movie could have followed. I wanted to know more about what she does after Romero leaves the room, not because her transness needed further explanation, but because Vásquez had made her too interesting to remain this lightly sketched.

The film’s use of Spanish and Maya K’iche’ adds another layer without stopping to translate its significance for us. Romero moves between languages as he moves between home and the city, and for a viewer reading English subtitles, it would be easy not to register every switch. Ruano simply lets that linguistic divide exist inside the film rather than announcing it as another theme.

The same goes for masculinity. Romero’s colleagues carry guns, joke about one another, and monitor what kinds of desire are permissible for men like them. The threat isn’t always spectacular. Sometimes it’s a joke that keeps going. Sometimes it’s the need to prove you aren’t what another man just called you. “Nosotros” places that everyday patriarchal violence alongside the more familiar violence of gangs and economic coercion without flattening one into the other.

Looking Through the Glass

Paolo Girón’s cinematography may be the movie’s most consistently assured element. Guatemala feels lived in rather than photographed for an international audience: cold highlands, worn commercial spaces, cramped rooms, fluorescent shops, roads disappearing into darkness. Even the mall becomes its own little ecosystem of guards, salons, customers, bored workers, and people killing time.

There’s a small image early on that I loved. Long before their first encounter, Romero stands outside a beauty parlor while Nubia watches him from inside, the two separated by glass. On the wall behind Nubia is a sign reading “Se buscan señoritas.” In context, it’s simply a help-wanted notice looking for women to work at the salon. But the placement is too delicious not to notice: Nubia leaning against the wall, already eyeing Romero through the window, while those words hover behind her. Ruano doesn’t pause so we can congratulate ourselves for catching it. It’s just there.

The film is full of these semiotic details. Arcade guns and real guns. Food after sex. A neon drink in a plastic bag. An older couple suddenly getting up to sing in a bar, their faces carrying far more history than the movie needs to explain. Ruano seems genuinely interested in people who could easily remain background figures.

The boxy frame helps too. Characters are repeatedly caught behind windows, counters, doorways, inside cars, and against one another. For a movie about people looking for room to move, the image keeps finding ways to contain them.

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‘Nosotros’: A Confidently Paced, Slice-of-Life Guatemalan Cinema

I’ve seen “Nosotros” described as slow, but I can’t really agree. It’s leisurely, certainly, and its construction owes more to slice-of-life cinema than conventional romantic drama. But I never felt its 79 minutes dragging. My problem was almost the reverse. Just as some of these characters started becoming more interesting, the movie was already preparing to leave them.

Ruano’s debut sometimes mistakes implication for exploration. There are threads here that deserved another scene, maybe another conversation, maybe just another five minutes sitting beside Nubia. Still, I’d rather watch a filmmaker trust images and behavior too much than explain everything until the characters disappear beneath the themes.

The final image belongs almost entirely to Vásquez, and I won’t explain what brings Nubia there. Her face has to process several things at once, and Ruano has enough confidence not to rescue her with dialogue. It’s easily one of the film’s strongest moments.

“Nosotros” is also my first real encounter with Guatemalan cinema. I came away with reservations, but mostly I came away curious. I want more from Nubia, and I wanted Ruano to dig further into some of the ideas he introduces. And yet I also want to see what he makes next, and what else Guatemalan filmmakers have been doing while I simply wasn’t paying attention.

For a small debut that left me wishing it were longer, that’s not a bad place to start.

A joint production between Guatemala and Mexico, Joaquin Ruano’s “Nosotros” had its world premiere at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival under the Discovery program. The festival runs from September 10 to 20, 2026. Follow us for more coverage.