1172 | 967 | Imagining the future of Galician rural territories through filmic geographical imaginaries: the controversy of As Bestas | Estévez Vilariño, Brais; Vila Vázquez, José Ignacio
Between 2005 and 2009, the Galician government approved a funding programme that allowed a generation of filmmakers to produce films outside the industry. Paradoxically, this funding system began to be consolidated when the financial crisis broke out in 2008. While many of these filmmakers began to make their work, the economic crisis pushed them out of the job market and blocked their careers. Perhaps for this reason, even if most of these authors came from urban areas, almost of their films were explorations of rural Galician modes of existence. In a way, rural areas, which these authors identified with their ancestral origins, emerged in these films as a refuge for imagining possible lives beyond the crisis._x000D_
While these films achieved some success, their images of the Galician territories, represented as essentially rural, were consolidated in the collective imagination of filmmakers and audiences alike._x000D_
In recent years, some authors have chosen the Galician countryside as the location for their fictions, taking advantage of the momentum of these films. One example is As Bestas (Sorogoyen, 2022), a success among the Spanish public, but also a film that has generated a lot of controversy due to the geographical imaginary it proposed, based on the Galician countryside._x000D_
The film is a fiction inspired by a true crime that took place in 2010 in a Galician village. Two local brothers murdered a neo-rural, Dutch national who lived in the village with his wife and had recently become part of the community forestry that managed a significant part of the village’s forest area._x000D_
In this paper, we propose a discursive and visual analysis of As Bestas with the aim of exploring what kind of geographical imaginaries the film proposes and, at the same time, questioning how these same imaginaries do or do not enable us to imagine the continuity of Galician rural life in a time of crisis.
Estévez Vilariño, Brais; Vila Vázquez, José Ignacio
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Departamento de Xeografía.
ID Abstract: 967