Barrio Lives

This opening session zooms in on the origins of films centred around Madrid through the eyes of different film-makers as it aims to recreate the collective imagery of an authentic, working-class Madrid in the early decades of the 20^th century. Moreover, the session features live music from Racalmuto, a jazz ensemble who on this occasion will fuse sax, clarinet, double bass and piano.

The film El inquilino (The Tenant) is a mordant comedy of manners on the search for social housing in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood in the 1950s, depicting the bureaucratic labyrinth that stands in the way of the working class accessing new official offers of social housing. The film’s premiere occurred in parallel with the opening of Spain’s Ministry of Housing, and it was in this context that its sharp and public critique became an obstacle to the propaganda of the Franco regime, which exerted influence on its scant distribution and censored different scenes, including a forced alternative ending. On this occasion, both endings are screened: the film in its entirety with the original ending filmed by the director and, as an epilogue, the censored ending screened at the time of release.

La grieta (The Divide), winner of the Jury and Audience Award at the 2018 DocumentaMadrid festival, shows the events surrounding the eviction of a poverty-stricken family after the sale of their state-subsidised flat to a vulture fund. The film thus examines the implacable violence of real estate capital and the protection offered by social movements, while sensitively and empathetically depicting the family and residents in the Madrid neighbourhood of Villaverde.

One of the landmark films of Latin American cinema in recent decades, La estrategia del caracol (The Strategy of the Snail) shows an eccentric and creative community opposing the demolition of their house in Bogotá. The film explores the idea of one of the residents, an old Spanish anarchist, on the home being simply the place where the community resides. Therefore, the tenants are ready to move the house — rooms and belongings included — to the neighbouring hills. Underlying the film is the theory that the best way to challenge authority is through the most unpredictable imagination.

Two polar views of the city, two ways of understanding society at loggerheads. On one side, Robert Moses (1888–1981), a high-ranking public official for urbanism over four decades in New York and ideologist of mass urban planning based on high-density work and residential spaces connected by large-scale communication channels. On the other side, Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), a journalist, essayist and advocate of unpredictable and intermingled street life as an example of a liveable and sustainable city. Between the two the battle for New York via the Greenwich Village neighbourhood — the omnipotent Robert Moses and his project to demolish the heart of Manhattan to build an expressway and resident Jane Jacobs, who would convince the Village residents, and the world while she was at it, that cities must be spaces in which to live.

Porto seen through the now-centenarian eyes of Manoel de Oliveira. Porto da minha infância (Porto of My Childhood) is one of the most alluring and revealing films from the poetics of the great Portuguese film-maker. Documentary, fiction and filmed theatre are interwoven in a narrative that traces the footprints of the film-maker’s childhood and adolescence in the Portuguese city, a city of opera, literary gatherings and bourgeois coteries and also a city of sexual awakening and the seeds of Oliveira’s artistic calling in episodes evoked as the ruins of a bygone age, the traces of which remain in the city but will never return.

What remains of cities when the uniform time of contemporary culture fades? This double session on London and Madrid centres on the anachronisms that linger and show cities’ identities under the sheen of cutting-edge and innovation. The London Nobody Knows is an absorbing documentary which has been recently recovered and features the esteemed actor James Mason acting as a guide around the London of proletariat culture, gradually erased by the skyscrapers of the City. Jacques Duron, meanwhile, sets forth an anthropological film on 1990s Madrid, in which the city’s central neighbourhoods are a mass of working class dwellers and ritualistic-like local celebrations.

A longshoreman and a prostitute cling to their relationship in an environment of disintegration. The decline and dismantlement of the port of Genova evokes the memories and images of the city’s industrial past mixed with an ebbing memory of the working class. Part documentary, part fiction, Pietro Marcello rubs shoulders with the great neorealist tradition, recounting, with the permission of Pier Paolo Pasolini, love in the midst of collapse.

The journey of three children to fulfil a family promise spreads out an atlas around the spaces of marginalisation which form Nazaret, an old fisherman’s quarter in Valencia. The motorway of relentless traffic, the wasteland between factories and the abandoned architecture facing the futuristic Ciudad de las Artes and new luxury apartments sketch the path to neglect. Against these contrasts is the loyalty of the three kids in the hinterland, silhouetted against a commitment made. Morais, one of the most ethical voices in Spain’s new cinema, follows the path trodden by directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Abbas Kiarostami to define restrained and humanistic poetics.

A science-fiction classic which, with no special effects, stands firm in its conception of genre as a metaphor to question the present. Detective Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is sent to the country of Alphaville, a technocracy governed by super-computer Alpha 60. “The essence of the so-called capitalist word or the communist world… simply the natural ambition of any organisation to plan all its actions,” the computer pronounces. The film descends into a society governed by extreme rationality and absolute logic, in which any emotion or feeling is erased from the language.

An unnerving documentary on replica and desire among China’s new affluent class and tourist-driven Europe. A group of Chinese architects and promoters study the history and architecture of Cadaqués with the aim of reproducing this Mediterranean enclave as a holiday town on the Chinese coast. The film thus portrays the inhabitants’ aspirations of this mock urban planning at the same time as it visits the historic town on the Costa Brava, previously an inspiration for artists like Salvador Dalí and now invaded by global tourism. Which one is the fake experience? 

This screening marks the 30^th anniversary of Spike Lee’s film, the second in his six-film series, including Crooklyn (1994) and Red Hook Summer (2012), on New York’s Brooklyn neighbourhood. Lee, also one of the main actors in the film, breaks down racist stereotypes and analyses the frustration, fear and lack of visibility of the African-American community as a source of racial unrest. An accurate dissection of the black community’s and other minorities’ language, gestures, culture and music combines appropriations of the history of cinema with a profound knowledge of neighbourhood life to create an essential film.

Paris is Burning focuses on dance as an element of partying and resistance for the Hispanic, black and homosexual community in mid-1980s New York. In other words, communities facing discrimination over race and sexual orientation. Voguing involves appropriating the predominant gestures and poses from the white fashion and music world by a racialised and queer minority, with the new dance adapted on the basis of deconstructing gender and social class roles. A huge influence on theorists like Judith Butler, the film explores how its leading characters (Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza and Dorian Corey) take on the strategies that construct stardom from the audiovisual industry to proclaim a dissident identity.