The struggle against home evictions in Spain through documentary films

Since its inception in 2009, the housing movement in Spain, led by the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), has confronted a devastating wave of housing foreclosures and evictions. Remarkably, the PAH has enjoyed wide coverage in the mass media. Among the latter, numerous fiction and non-fiction films have portrayed home evictions and the housing struggles opposing them. This article selects four documentaries focused on the PAH and investigates how they represent the context of social and political contention and their contribution to fostering housing activism. In so doing, we mainly use first-hand interviews with the filmmakers and a comparative analysis of the narrative strategies followed by each documentary. As for the context, we present the demands, campaigns and protest repertoires of the PAH in relation to the post-2008 global financial crisis, which frames the political significance of the documentaries. By comparing the examined documentaries, we find that their narrative strategies split into ‘direct’ and ‘lecturing’ approaches on the one hand, and ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ spheres of the context subject to representation on the other. In addition, the filmmaker’s activist engagement substantially shaped the production and dissemination of the films.