Director: João Canijo
A crumbling seaside hotel becomes a pressure cooker of old grudges in Bad Living, João Canijo's 2023 chamber drama about four generations of women who can barely stand to be in the same room.
What is Bad Living about?
On Portugal's northern coast, a family keeps a once-proud hotel limping along even as its rooms empty out and its finances collapse. The women who run it share blood but little warmth: years of small betrayals, favoritism, and unspoken disappointments have hardened into routine cruelty. Into this stalemate arrives a granddaughter nobody quite expected back, her presence enough to knock loose memories the family had agreed, without ever discussing it, to bury. Old alliances shift, new resentments surface, and the hotel itself, drafty and half-empty, starts to feel like a character absorbing every argument into its walls. Canijo shot the film as a companion piece alongside a second feature covering the same events from the staff's perspective, and Bad Living premiered at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival, where it took a top jury prize.
Cast & crew
Anabela Moreira and Rita Blanco anchor the ensemble as mother and grandmother locked in decades of quiet warfare, with Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, and Vera Barreto rounding out the family across generations. Nuno Lopes, Filipa Areosa, and Leonor Silveira fill in the surrounding cast, and the entire group was filmed in overlapping scenes for both this feature and its sister film, giving every performance a lived-in continuity rarely achieved on a single shoot.
Context & significance
Director João Canijo has built a career on exactly this kind of unflinching domestic drama, and Bad Living arrived as one half of an unusual cinematic experiment: two full-length features, same cast and location, telling one story from two angles. Watching it alongside genre neighbors on K-Time gives a sense of how far European art-house drama has moved from tidy resolutions toward slow-burn portraits of families who simply cannot let each other go, for better or worse.
Where & how to watch
Bad Living is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, no separate purchase required to view the page itself. The platform's Persian-language interface, subtitles, and dubbing make Canijo's dense, dialogue-heavy drama easy to follow for Farsi-speaking audiences across the diaspora, and browsing, searching, and reading title pages stays open even before signing in.