Honeyjoon

On the first anniversary of the death of her husband from cancer, Persian-Kurdish immigrant Lela (Amira Casar) travels with her American-born daughter June (Ayden Mayeri) to the Azores islands of Portugal — a place her late husband cherished — intending to scatter a lock of his hair into the sea as a memorial gesture. The two women arrive with profoundly different agendas. Lela wants to fully inhabit her grief, share her sorrow with June, and deepen their mother-daughter bond in the wake of the man who previously anchored their relationship. June, who has recently dropped out of her medical residency, is more interested in reclaiming her joie de vivre: meeting attractive Portuguese men, enjoying the scenery, and resisting her mother's pull toward prolonged mourning. Their stylistic clash is sharpened by the island's atmosphere — the pair find themselves perpetually surrounded by blissfully affectionate honeymooners, making their own fractured dynamic all the more conspicuous. Lela, meanwhile, is also wrestling with a broader exile: haunted by memories of Iran before the revolution that drove her family out, she watches news about the ongoing Woman, Life, Freedom movement in her homeland with a mix of longing and grief for a country and an identity she lost long ago. A charismatic, philosophically inclined local tour guide named João (José Condessa) disrupts both women's plans with his warmth and intellectual energy. June pursues a romantic connection with him, but during an intimate encounter unexpectedly breaks down in tears — the suppressed grief she has been avoiding finally overwhelming her. At roughly the same moment, Lela finds her own private emotional release. Through these parallel catharses, mother and daughter begin to close the distance between them, discovering that what they each needed was not to grieve in their own separate ways but to find their way back to each other and, in doing so, to come back to life.

Sources: IMDb (search-result synopsis), wherever-i-look.com review, themoviewaffler.com review, Wikipedia (premise only, no dedicated plot section)