Urban fortunes: Spatializing the community of money in Alex de la Iglesia’s La comunidad

This article reads Alex de la Iglesia’s La comunidad (2000) as an act of resistance to urban transformation in Madrid and its deleterious consequences. Crucial to the arguments advanced in these pages are the idea of community and the importance of place. The former is one of the five formative elements of urban consciousness in David Harvey’s project of explaining the urban process under capital. The film presents an extended, problematic, examination of how a grouping that should bind people together can be skewed by money and capital to do the opposite. These pages also underscore the filmmaker’s deep engagement with urban issues in a way that makes the places in which the members of the community interact help form the arguments in favor of resisting the abuses of the urban process that he weaves into its narrative structure.