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Ivan & Hadoum places romance inside a greenhouse, which sounds almost too neat until the film starts using that setting with quiet intelligence. Writer-director Ian de la Rosa turns the industrial agriculture of Almería into a pressure chamber: sun, plastic, metal, sweat, bosses, workers, cameras, rumors, and fragile promises of upward mobility. Love grows there, yes, though hardly in fresh air.
Iván, played by Silver Chicón, is a trans man whose future appears tied to the greenhouse once co-owned by his late father. A promotion could give his family better housing and a small piece of security. Hadoum, played by Herminia Loh Moreno, arrives as a seasonal worker of Moroccan heritage, carrying warmth, wit, and a refusal to bow her head for comfort. Their attraction is immediate, yet the film understands that desire rarely arrives alone. It brings family history, class tension, workplace politics, and the old human problem of being seen too clearly. That last part stings.
A Romance Built from Recognition
The relationship between Iván and Hadoum works because it has the texture of recognition. They knew each other before Iván’s transition, and their reunion carries a strange charge: the past has not vanished, yet it does not control the present. Hadoum sees him now. She desires him now. The film treats that fact with an almost radical simplicity.
Their early scenes have a looseness that helps the romance breathe. The bar encounter, where Hadoum sings in Moroccan Arabic and is dismissed for it, gives the film one of its sharpest social pinpricks. Bigotry here is casual, petty, almost bored with itself.
Iván’s response draws the two closer, and the later beach sequence shifts the film from flirtation into trust. The intimacy between them is tender without feeling sanitized. De la Rosa does not turn Iván’s body into a thesis topic. He lets hesitation, touch, and reassurance carry the emotional argument.
Hadoum’s confidence unsettles Iván in productive ways. She seems freer than he is, at least on the surface, able to imagine departure and change. Yet her freedom is precarious. She is a temporary worker in a system built to consume labor quietly, then move on. Iván has roots, yet those roots look suspiciously like chains. There’s the rub, as Shakespeare would say, probably while checking the payroll.
The Greenhouse as a Small Nation
The greenhouse functions like a miniature state, complete with class hierarchy, border anxiety, labor discipline, and a mythology of family loyalty. Manuel, the owner and former partner of Iván’s father, offers Iván a path toward management. It is presented as care, inheritance, and responsibility. It is also a bargain. Iván can rise, provided he accepts the logic of the place.
Hadoum stands on the other side of that logic. After unsafe conditions and workplace neglect, she becomes involved in worker resistance. The looming sale to German investors, fears of layoffs, and an audit that could alter everyone’s future give the film a clear political frame. Yet de la Rosa avoids reducing the story to slogans. The conflict lands because every position has a cost. Iván’s family needs his promotion. Hadoum’s coworkers need solidarity. Manuel speaks the language of loyalty while guarding power.
This is where the film’s historical echoes become meaningful. Migrant labor in Europe has often been praised in public and squeezed in private, from postwar reconstruction economies to modern agricultural supply chains. Ivan & Hadoum places that tension inside a romance, making the personal and political painfully adjacent. The immigrant worker is welcome while useful. The trans man is affirmed while compliant. Acceptance becomes conditional, a contract written in invisible ink.
Iván’s central question is deceptively simple: what kind of man does he want to be? The film refuses easy nobility. Survival can make cowards of people. It can make pragmatists too. The difference is rarely clear while rent is due.
Faces, Heat, Mirrors, and Small Ruptures
Ian de la Rosa directs with patience, trusting small gestures and awkward silences. The film often lets scenes sit in discomfort, which gives the drama a lived-in quality. There are no grand declarations of meaning, no speech that announces the movie’s politics in neon letters. Thank heaven. The politics are in the warehouse routines, the family apartment, the withheld medical care, the way a boss can sound affectionate while tightening a leash.
Silver Chicón gives Iván a guarded softness. His smile feels like a door opening by accident, then closing before anyone can comment on it. He captures a man who wants tenderness, respect, money, and moral clarity, then discovers life offers those things in mutually inconvenient bundles. Herminia Loh Moreno brings Hadoum a direct, luminous presence. She is playful, wounded, stubborn, and alert to humiliation before anyone names it. Together, they create a romance with pulse.
Beatriz Sastre’s cinematography gives the Almería landscape a strange duality. The sunlit exteriors suggest openness, yet the greenhouse feels sealed, monitored, and faintly unreal. The infrared image of Iván and Hadoum kissing inside the greenhouse is one of the film’s strongest visual ideas: love recorded by a system designed for control. The carnival mirror scene works in a similar register, turning identity into reflection, distortion, play, and exposure.
The film has weaker spots. Some narrative turns feel familiar, and Iván’s family could have used sharper definition. The labor conflict also moves with a slight compression that softens its force. Still, Ivan & Hadoum has a rare kind of patience with its characters. It lets them be inconsistent, frightened, horny, funny, selfish, brave, and occasionally foolish. In other words, people.
Iván & Hadoum is a Spanish, German, and Belgian romantic drama written and directed by Ian de la Rosa. The film premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival on February 13, 2026, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film. It later screened at festivals including Málaga and D’A Film Festival. The story follows Iván, a trans man working in a greenhouse in Almería, who falls in love with Hadoum, a newly hired Moroccan-Spanish co-worker, while his expected promotion complicates their relationship. As of June 1, 2026, the film is not available on a confirmed streaming platform. It is scheduled for theatrical release in Spain on June 12, 2026, through Avalon.
Full Credits
- Title: Iván & Hadoum
- Distributor: Avalon
- International Sales: Indie Sales
- Release Date: February 13, 2026 at the Berlin International Film Festival, scheduled for theatrical release in Spain on June 12, 2026
- Running Time: 100 minutes
- Director: Ian de la Rosa
- Writers: Ian de la Rosa
- Producers and Executive Producers: Stefan Schmitz, Emilia Fort, José Alba, Odile Antonio-Baez, Carlotta Schiavon, Jan Krüger, Roshanak Khodabakhsh, Flavia Biurrun, Hubert Toint
- Cast: Silver Chicón, Herminia Loh, Úrsula Díaz Manzano, Esperanza Guardado, Cisco Lara, Nico Montoya, Gregor Acuña-Pohl
- Director of Photography: Beatriz Sastre
- Editors: Yannick Leroy
- Sound Design: Ingrid Simon
The Review
Ivan & Hadoum
Ivan & Hadoum is a tender, politically alert romance that finds drama in the friction between love, labor, family duty, and conditional acceptance. Ian de la Rosa’s feature debut has a few familiar story beats and some underwritten supporting characters, yet its emotional intelligence carries real force. Silver Chicón and Herminia Loh Moreno give the film its pulse, turning a workplace romance into a study of dignity under pressure.
PROS
- Strong chemistry between Silver Chicón and Herminia Loh Moreno
- Thoughtful handling of trans identity without reducing Iván to one trait
- Rich greenhouse setting tied to class, labor, and surveillance
- Patient, humane direction from Ian de la Rosa
- Memorable visual moments, especially the infrared kiss
CONS
- Some plot beats feel familiar
- Supporting family characters could be sharper
- Labor conflict feels slightly compressed
- A few themes would benefit from deeper exploration
