Looking amid the rubble: New Spanish documentary film and the residues of urban transformation (Joaquim Jordà and José Luis Guerín)

Spanish documentary film has experienced an extraordinary flourishing during the beginning of the twenty-first century, in parallel with the increasing democratization of audiovisual means of production. In this essay I link this democratization with Spanish documentary’s tendency to become a collective social experiment that emphasizes interactions between film-makers and filmed social actors. In particular, I analyze the case of films dealing with urban transformation, because their capacity of intervening in the processes of social construction of reality is especially significant.