Biutiful Movie (2010)

Biutiful is a drama film directed by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Javier Bardem. It is González Iñárritu's first feature since Babel and fourth overall, and his first film in his native Spanish language since his debut feature Amores perros. The title Biutiful refers to the phonological spelling in Spanish of the English word beautiful.

Uxbal lives in a shabby apartment in Barcelona with his two young children, Ana and Mateo (played by Hanaa Bouchaib and Guillermo Estrella, respectively). He is separated from their mother Marambra, an unreliable and reckless woman suffering from alcoholism and bipolar disorder. Having grown up an orphan, Uxbal has no family other than his brother Tito, who works in the construction business. Uxbal earns a living by organizing work of illegal immigrants, a group of Chinese producing forged goods, and a group of African street vendors selling them. He is able to talk to the dead and is sometimes paid to pass on messages from the recently deceased at wakes and funerals. When he is diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and is told to only have a few months to live, his world progressively falls apart.

Uxbal initially begins chemotherapy, but later ends the treatment at the advice of his friend and traditional healer Bea. She also gives him two black stones which she asks him to give his children before he dies. The group of Africans are brutally arrested by the police despite Uxbal's regular bribes. As his friend Ekweme faces deportation to Senegal, Uxbal offers Ekweme's wife Ige and their baby son a room in his apartment. Meanwhile, an attempt at reconciliation with Marambra fails when Uxbal realizes she cannot be trusted to raise his children. Tito brokers a deal to put the Chinese to work at a construction site. However, almost all of them die while asleep in the basement of their sweatshop due to malfunctioning gas heaters that Uxbal provided to heat their clammy sleeping quarters. An attempt by the human trafficker to dump the bodies of the Chinese into the sea fails when they are washed up on the shore shortly after.

As Uxbal's health continues to deteriorate, he is plagued with guilt that he is responsible for the death of the Chinese immigrants. As his death draws nearer, he realizes that there will be nobody to take care of Ana and Mateo once he is gone. He entrusts the remainder of his savings to Ige, asking her to stay with the children after his death. She accepts his request, but later decides to use the money to pay for her return to Africa. However, she changes her mind at the last minute and returns to the apartment. Knowing that Ige will take care of his children, Uxbal lies down next to Ana and dies after having passed on to her a diamond ring which his father had once given to his mother. After his death, he is reunited in a snowy winter landscape with his father, who had died before Uxbal's birth shortly after having fled Spain for Mexico during the Franco regime.