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Geolocalizaciones y nuevas ruralidades | Geolocations and new ruralities

The description of community life is not always easy for cinema, which tends to focus on characters. However, this film bets on making a collective story where the inhabitants of a village will have to make decisions that will radically change their lives. The choral portrait offered by this documentary is testimony to a common thread based on the commitment of a group of people from all generations to keep alive their population and their traditions.

Synopsis: Ametlla de Merola is one of the smallest towns in Catalonia, with just over 150 inhabitants. The theater is the central nucleus of the town, but they will have to close it due to lack of resources: it doesn’t even have seats. Everything changes when this textile colony wins the Christmas jackpot and its inhabitants decide to invest the money in renovating the theater and prevent it from disappearing.

Free community event

Rural life has undergone countless changes in the last two centuries, as has also occurred in the urban sphere. Migratory movements have been depopulating huge agricultural areas, where the youngest inhabitants have moved to cities to forge their future, often outside their own countries. In recent times, however, there has been a new vocation to recover the elements of wellbeing that the rural environment offers to the people and communities that make it up. Existence outside busy urban life has become an alternative model of sustainability and coexistence that proposes another way of repopulating rural spaces, but beyond the idyllic readings of this return, a sector of the population is trying to define and found this new rural life.

In order to illustrate these new movements, the Cervantes Institute presents an online film program with four documentaries that bring us closer to stories of life in the countryside in four very different parts of the Spanish geography. The four stories open a window on the lights and shadows of this way of life and offer a contemporary perspective on traditions, but also on the problems involved in maintaining these new challenges for the future.

Program:

• May 5, 2023: Soñando un lugar (2018), de Alfonso Kint
• May 12, 2023: Os fillos da vide (2017), de Ana Domínguez
• May 19, 2023: 150 i una grossa (2020), de Aurora Sulli y Núria Deulofeu
• May 26, 2023: Los saldos (2022), de Raúl Capdevila