The struggle against home evictions in Spain through documentary films

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Housing activism
• documentary films
• Spain

Public visibility is a key feature in the development of social movements. Claims need to be publicly conveyed in order to gain support and legitimacy and to influence their opponents. As Tilly and Tarrow (2007, p. 119) noted, social movements must ‘make public representations of their worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment’. In this respect, audio-visual products such as documentary films belong to the broad field of cultural and communicative devices appropriate for meeting a movement’s search for visibility. However, activists are seldom skilled at producing high-quality films, so these are usually the result of sympathetic or supportive filmmakers. In this article we examine four documentaries about the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages¹ (PAH), the leading organisation in the Spanish housing movement over the last decade (from 2009 onwards). The PAH became known as a powerful grassroots response to some of the 2008 global financial crisis’ most dramatic consequences—unemployment, foreclosures, housing financialisation and home evictions (Alexandri & Janoschka, 2018; Barranco et al. 2018; Casellas & Sala 2017; Martínez, 2019; Yrigoy, 2018). The aim of our analysis is to compare, first, the content of the documentaries with each other and, second, in relation to the contentious context in which the housing movement unfolded. Hence, we interrogate the films and their directors according to the three following questions: How do they differ in representing the context of housing struggles? What is the underlying strategy of each film? To what extent do these films contribute to housing activism in Spain (and elsewhere)?

Housing struggles are more or less visible according to different circumstances. Those located in the Global South, for example, enjoy less coverage and attention than those from the Global North. In terms of the communicative devices at play, audiovisual means such as short journalistic video clips and feature-length fiction films can reach larger audiences than academic papers in scientific journals. However, within the audiovisual domain, documentary films occupy a diffuse position. They are placed in the midst of a continuum between narratives intending objectivity (such as journalism and science) and narratives that foster imagination or entertainment (through fiction and art). As acknowledged by previous studies, the documentary genre usually lies in a subaltern tier when compared to the most profitable industries of communication, despite a recent higher share of attention due to the proliferation of commercial on-demand and mostly non-commercial peer-to-peer online platforms² (Nisbet & Aufderheide, 2009). Furthermore, documentaries are not alien to the incorporation of both fictional resources (Renov, 1993) in addition to their traditionally realistic ones. This adds to the activist subcategory of films when certain topics, stories and approaches that are marginalised in mainstream narratives become overtly disclosed and discussed (Walsh, 2016)³. As we will show, this is the case of the four documentaries under scrutiny here.

The issues of housing and housing struggles are particularly significant in this regard. Documentary films about these topics are not abundant, and they rarely circulate through commercial venues. To name just a few significant cases: Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle (2017)⁴ was released after the protests engendered by the Grenfell Tower fire as ‘a symbol for the spatialised inequalities of global cities like London [and] a beacon for the violent effects of neoliberalism and post-crash austerity’ (Burgum, 2019, p. 458). Another recent release is Christiania: 40 Years of Occupation (2014, directed by Richard Jackman and Robert Lawson)⁵, which took advantage of the controversies and popularity that this Danish squatted free town enjoyed as both a social experiment of self-management and a tourist attraction that was eventually forced to comply with court verdicts (Thörn et al., 2011). Another timely and very much awarded documentary film following the United Nations rapporteur on the right to housing, Leilani Farha, across various countries is Push (2019, directed by Fredrik Gertten)⁶, which airs critical views of housing affairs from a human rights perspective (Rolnik, 2019). In a rare study, most of the available videos and documentaries about the squatting movement in Spain have also been identified and studied (Galán, 2017; Martínez, 2018).

In the present article we investigate the context, content and implications of four remarkable documentaries about the PAH: Sí se puede. Seven Days at PAH Barcelona (Sí se puede. Siete días en PAH Barcelona; 2014, directed by Pau Faus)⁷, Mortgaged Lives (2014, directed by Michelle Teran)⁸, Dignity (La dignidad; 2016, directed by Michelle Teran)⁹ and The Divide (La grieta; 2017, directed by Alberto García Ortiz and Irene Yagüe Herrero)¹⁰. Compared to the only other available study on this matter (Alvarez, 2019), here we choose non-fiction films because these may reflect better than fictional narratives the context of the struggle and the activists’ concerns as regards making their demands visible. In each of these four cases, the film directors were engaged in the PAH as occasional participants and supporters. This connection, more difficult to verify in other films, was our main motivation in selecting the films. In addition, we wanted to cover different points of view and narrative strategies. Hence, we aimed to understand how these documentaries distinctively contribute to the housing struggles they represent. In so doing, we mainly used first-hand interviews with the filmmakers as well as our own socio-semiotic interpretations of the films (Cobley & Randviir, 2009; Ruiz, 2009) in line with critical housing studies (Chatterjee et al., 2019; Madden & Marcuse, 2016).

The article is structured as follows. The next section introduces the demands, campaigns and protest repertoires of the PAH in relation to the housing crisis in Spain. This provides the context that frames the political significance of the documentaries and allows our focused interpretation. We continue with short descriptions of the main contents, stories and key messages conveyed by the documentaries. The final section before our conclusions is dedicated to a comparison of the four documentaries and a discussion of their contributions in supporting the PAH.

Capitalist development in Spain, the housing crisis and grassroots responses

The Spanish housing system is characterised by a structural shortage of social housing and a huge economic specialisation in the financial–real estate sector (López & Rodríguez, 2011). This model is based on homeownership as the dominant way of accessing housing. Around 80% of the population are homeowners and only 20% rent. This dominant form of tenure also represented a crucial means of wealth accumulation and income after retirement, at least until 2008. The usual belief in an increasing revalorisation of real estate property, however, came to an end when the housing bubble burst.

The state elites had successfully promoted homeownership since the 1950s, one decade after the dictatorial regime was brutally established, when most of the stock was rental housing. In addition, during the period that preceded the 2008 crisis, homeownership was fuelled by the massive construction of new buildings and deregulation of the financial system catering both to developers and homebuyers. As a result, more than 4.2 million homes were built in Spain between 2001 and 2011 (more than in Germany, Italy and France combined during the same period); price inflation was 232% between 1997 and 2007; and the vacancy rates according to 2011 data is still estimated at between 14% and 28% (absolute numbers are between 3.5 and 7.1 million dwellings), depending on whether secondary and vacation homes are included (Observatorio de la Sostenibilidad, 2015).

Due to these structural conditions, the impact of the 2008 recession was deeper in Spain than in other countries. In particular, the central role of the real estate industry in the national economy was combined with the lack of social housing—no more than 2% is state-owned rental housing (Defensor del Pueblo, 2019, p. 20; Scanlon et al., 2015). Therefore, the financial collapse resulted in a wave of, on average, 80,000 evictions per year between 2009 and 2015 (Martínez, 2019, p. 1607).

Since the beginning of the 2008 crisis, state intervention has reproduced the same pattern of pre-crisis policies. These consisted of legislation that favoured the transfer of public resources to financial firms, whereas the protection of the right to housing was fully neglected. Defaults on mortgage loans led both commercial and saving banks to a critical situation in which the state rescued them with public funds. After this massive bailout and the concentration of capital in a fewer number of banks, the European Union (EU) forced the Spanish state to set up a new public-private bank Sociedad de Gestión de Activos Procedentes de la Reestructuración Bancaria (SAREB) in order to manage so-called toxic assets (properties subject to unpaid loans) owned by private financial firms. While all the benefits of SAREB are privately distributed, the financial responsibility of its likely default in the coming years will solely fall on the side of the state (Gabarre, 2019, pp. 63–91). Most housing movements claimed that SAREB’s assets should be used to create a new social housing stock. But this demand has not been met by state authorities. Quite the contrary, the central government implemented new policies and legislative changes aiming to foster another real estate speculation cycle. These included the 2013 Rental Housing Act (Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos) and privatisations of social housing into the hands of vulture funds. Nonetheless, housing activists strove for more progressive legislation at the regional scale, often with the harsh opposition of the central government (Martínez, 2019).

In particular, the PAH is a social movement organisation initially focused on preventing home evictions due to foreclosure procedures. It was born in 2009 in Barcelona and quickly became extended across most Spanish regions and cities. A previous and short-lived housing movement active around 2005–06 served to forge the concerns of the pioneers who established the PAH. But, more precisely, it was the 2008 economic crash which triggered unprecedented forms of housing activism that have continued to date, more than a decade later. The Occupy-like mobilisations that took place in 2011 (the 15 M or Indignados movement) and the spin-off campaigns and struggles derived from that uprising until mid-2014, became a perfect milieu—in terms of movement coalitions and convergence—for the growth of the PAH. Housing groups were also formed within post-15M neighbourhood assemblies, and most of them increasingly turned to be associated with the PAH, resulting in over 250 nodes spread around the country (Di Feliciantonio, 2017; Gonick, 2016).

In addition to blockading evictions through civil disobedient actions, the PAH demanded legal changes to the regulation of mortgage lending. In striking contrast with other Western countries, there is no mandatory ‘nonrecourse debt’ or ‘payment by account’ once the mortgage holder is unable to pay off the loan. The consequence is that foreclosures lead to home repossessions, but the remaining debt is not cancelled. Under these conditions, not only was homelessness a likely result but economic recovery, even while being employed, was also almost impossible for the evicted individuals and households. This was framed as ‘civil death’ by PAH activists. The drama of home evictions and the lack of any residential alternative due to the meagre social housing stock available in Spain are two of the key themes that captured the attention of mass media audiences. A brave grassroots resistance to that fate and a strong self-help organisation were also central images of the somehow heroic portrait that was frequently presented in the press, at least until 2015¹¹. Occupations of empty buildings and bank offices, street demonstrations, escraches that shamed political representatives reluctant to change the legislation (Flesher, 2015), institutional pressure on local and regional authorities, and regular exposure to media coverage became rather distinct protest repertoires for the Spanish housing movement led by the PAH.

With the support of the UN (Rolnik, 2019, pp. 271–277) and the EU, the PAH faced the ‘housing emergency’ not only by defying the injustice of the whole housing and financial system but also by demanding both short-term solutions, such as affordable rentals in the properties subject to foreclosure and the squatted bank-owned buildings, and long-term comprehensive housing policies. Moreover, PAH activists engaged in continuous and exhausting negotiations with political representatives, property owners and financial firms. Documentaries can hardly represent all these and other nuances. But, as we shall see in the next section, they can offer variegated approaches to the historical significance of such a struggle for a society which has been deeply damaged by the most recent capitalist crash.

Documentary films about the Spanish housing movement

Seven days at PAH Barcelona

Seven Days is a straightforward ‘militant documentary’ about the PAH. It explains what the PAH is, what it regularly does and how it is organised. It is divided into seven neatly differentiated parts, each of which explains a key element of the organisation or ‘PAH model’. The seven parts are divided into the days of the week, which represents both the title of the film and an attempt of the filmmaker to show the everyday life of the PAH.

Day 1: Welcoming Assembly shows the PAH’s initial contact with people who approach the organisation, its collective assembly and their first experiences of empowerment. Day 2: Mutual Support delves into practices of reciprocal relations and self-help as the basis of the organisation. Day 3: Coordination Assembly explains the organisational structures and highlights the role of claim-making campaigns. Day 4: Negotiation offers advice for negotiating with the banks in order to cancel debts. Day 5: State Assembly moves to the state-wide scale of coordination between the two hundred local nodes. Day 6: Community Work displays the Obra Social (Social work) project which frames the initiatives that squat empty blocks owned by banks in order to rehouse evicted families. Finally, Day 7: Actions introduces methods of preparation for various forms of protest actions and blockades.

In this way the documentary succeeds in conveying a very pedagogical narrative that legitimates the PAH and its goals of social justice as well as presenting its regular activities. In addition to this political dimension, the film is full of emotional and affective moments of celebration, victories and defeats. Above all, these elements are intended to reinforce the value of the documentary as a political toolbox or manual-like textbook that others could replicate elsewhere. We also interpret them as an outstanding component of the ‘PAH model’ in which affects, care and sensitivity among participants are as praised as political strategies.

Mortgaged lives

Mortgaged Lives uses the same title of a book published by two PAH founders (Colau & Alemany, 2012) which was translated into English by the filmmaker, Michelle Teran¹². The film is driven by different encounters of a group of psychology students who were engaged in the PAH. Among them we can identify Irene Montero, the Minister of Equality since 2020 as a member of the political party Podemos. It starts and concludes with their discussions at a reading group. In the central part of the narration, these student-activists meet various women who talk about their experiences going through home eviction. These scenes alternate with footage of several activist protests, a legal advisory meeting and activists’ reflections about their living conditions and the campaigns in which they are involved. The film director does not introduce any outsider’s discourse, voice-over or statistics. Both images and characters are intended to speak for themselves.

For example, in one of the initial scenes, a PAH activist walking in the middle of a road in Usera, a peripheral working-class neighbourhood of Madrid, calls for solidarity with a loud speaker: ‘Bankia [a bank which received a bailout from the state] is trying to evict one more time … I am humbly asking you not to let this happen and come to the door with us to stop yet another injustice.’

In another situation, the film shows a crowded room where lawyers are giving advice to those threatened with eviction. An activist, while holding blue folders in her arms, reminds those in attendance of the basic organisational rules of the PAH: ‘Everything PAH does is free, the mentoring, the advice we give, the talks with the lawyers, sorting out the court matters.’ Everyone looks serious. They are hoping to fix their cases. Many have brown and black skin and are likely immigrants from Latin American and African countries. Among them, a woman is manifestly pregnant. These features directly indicate the key intersectional social components of the PAH. Two young attorneys explain how the banks colluded with other firms to lift the appraisal price of the apartments in order to lend higher loan amounts.

Above all, the documentary focuses on women as prominent members of the housing struggles in Spain, both as leaders and as rank-and-file activists. Most of these women did not enter activism due to previous ideological motivations but as a result of their recent impoverishment. Either precarious jobs or unemployment led them to seek help from outside their households. Very often, their male partners and husbands experienced similar economic dislocations, but the housing question ended up being a female matter. The movie follows those women who stand up and fight for their rights as citizens who deserve welfare aid and relief. Due to the lack of state benefits and the brutal consequences of judicial verdicts when it comes to foreclosures, the PAH and other housing groups became led by these women. Therefore, the documentary suggests that the self-help approach taken by the PAH and its politics of care depend on the central role of women.

However, the workshop on mutual support and empowerment, which ran every two weeks over a one-year period, was in sharp contrast to other organisational meetings within the PAH, which motivated the filmmaker to select it as a particular angle to portray housing struggles in Spain.

Dignity

The second documentary directed by Teran about the housing crisis in Spain, Dignity (La dignidad), is named after a housing squat located in Móstoles, a peripheral municipality of Madrid. The squatters joined the PAH’s Obra Social campaign targeting empty buildings owned by bailed-out banks. According to this campaign, the previously evicted families and individuals do not squat but ‘recover’ a property that already belongs to the public. Their occupation is to protest against vacancy, homelessness and the lack of an effective social housing policy to address the critical situation of the squatters. Moreover, they demand social rents—a rent below the market price that is proportional to income—which distinguishes them from other more radical anti-property squatters. At the end of the documentary, the director reminds that the Obra Social campaign has managed to relocate over 3,500 people in 47 squats all over Spain.

The film pays attention to various aspects of everyday life in the squatted block. It also tells the personal stories of the squatters—how they ended up there, how they think, their particular circumstances, their self-organisation in the building. Hence, the film is a sort of thick and in-depth description of one of the numerous cases of housing squats that spread across the country. This massive grassroots response was manifested in new types of squatting firmly aligned with the general PAH strategy. Their criticism of the accumulation of empty dwellings by banks that benefited from the government’s aid while rising numbers of households became bankrupt, sharply discloses a core contradiction of capitalist societies.

Most of the story is told with a slow rhythm, long scenes and even a poetic lens. The priority is to show what residents and social relations look like, rather than explicit discourses. Teran’s main interest is to let the public access this everyday life in order to debunk the myths about squatters, but also to show how political organising is embedded in those daily practices. On the one hand, we see children playing, a neighbour helping another to change a tap, people vacuuming their apartments, singing, cooking, watching TV or just sitting in the living room. On the other hand, the film takes a micro-spatial perspective by showing a living room, a washing machine, or a piece of furniture with a fan and a flower and children’s toys. These scenes insist on the diversity of the squatters’ profiles. Moreover, they intend to portray them as ‘normal people’ whose houses and lives are alike those of the rest of the population. It is the social and economic breakdown that has forced them to squat.

In an interview with a male squatter, his daughter interrupts the scene, but the shooting goes on. This example illustrates Teran’s intention of not prioritising what is said but what is done, experienced, lived and shared. Politics, according to this implicit discourse, combines social life and campaigns, direct actions, criticisms and claims to the state. The film therefore makes it difficult to overlook the implications that the everyday life of activists has for the development of their political engagement.

There are other interviews with the residents of the squat too. Usually, their messages are explicit and direct. However, Teran avoids selecting phrases that could consistently build her own political discourse. On the contrary, the verbal fragments are long and with pause; even some silent moments are left uncut from the film.

The divide

The documentary The Divide (La grieta) portrays the hardships experienced by two poor households in the Madrid working-class neighbourhood of Villaverde. The main characters are two women Dolores and Isa who have been living in social housing units for long periods but are expecting forcible eviction soon. One case is due to more than 18 years of unauthorised squatting. The second case is due to rent arrears amounting to less than a thousand euros. The directors, Irene Yagüe Herrero and Alberto García Ortiz, decided to make this film after recording different home evictions, PAH meetings and direct actions between 2012 and 2015.

The narration starts with a real estate convention taking place in Madrid. It shows ads for property bargains as well as the normal activity of traders showcasing their business. In contrast, a poor old man is collecting merchandise from all the stalls. Among the participants in the fair, SAREB stands out. All of a sudden a group of PAH demonstrators disrupt the event by shouting the slogans, ‘Trial and punishment for those responsible [for the mortgage scam]’, ‘Shame on those that evict families!’, ‘Yes, we can’, ‘This is not a fair, this is a massacre’, and ‘We want a solution. Bankers to jail’. Before being expelled by the police, two women with scarves covering their heads and a Moroccan accent in their speech dramatically cried, with tears in their eyes, ‘Why is the IVIMA [regional housing company] selling our homes? Are they really theirs? We have all paid for these homes, and they are kicking us out now. They treat people like dogs.’ One of them then faints and falls to the floor.

The story returns to the intimate sphere rather frequently. For example, two of the children threatened with eviction are running and playing in the park. Their mother Dolores and a female neighbour chat about previous conversations with the social services. The children join the two women, and the camera shows pictures of the whole family hanging on the wall while Dolores answers a phone call from a fellow PAH member. ‘I am going to pack. I’ll stay home until the last minute, but I don’t want my furniture inside because I don’t want them to evict me with my belongings,’ she cries while smoking.

Despite the anxieties engendered by the loss of home, the two main characters are strong women. Not only is activist solidarity presented but also the community of mutual support among neighbours. Some spontaneous humoristic notes and the peaceful but defeated resistance to home eviction contribute to assembling the narrative as well. Through the eyes and words of Dolores and Isa, the film advances a deep critique of the economic and political system that led to unprecedented high numbers of home evictions.

How to represent a housing struggle?

In this section we will first compare the main content of the four documentaries and, next, discuss their strategic choices according to interviews with the filmmakers. We assume that documentary films are not scientific works seeking, for example, to provide accurate sampling of data or to test hypotheses of cause-effect relationships. However, script writers must still choose significant aspects of the reality they intend to portray and convey a coherent and realistic story of the events under examination. In this way, the films are able to trigger the curiosity of the audience and keep their attention to the end. Our inquiry, then, addresses the differences in these strategies as well as their efficacy for the sake of housing activism.

Seven Days at PAH Barcelona

Although all documentaries display some relevant statistics about the context of the housing crisis in post-2008 Spain, Seven Days does the best job in tying this data to the PAH’s official discourse and practice. Both the political-economic crisis and the contentious dynamics in which the PAH was involved are accurately represented. However, as we will see, the film intended to agitate more than to inform.

As the director and his team of collaborators¹³—all of whom were PAH members—declared, their main goal was ‘to show the movement from the inside’. This documentary ‘from the inside’ needed only to gather information and knowledge gained in recent years. ‘We had been participating in the assemblies for years, being a part of the movement, participating in its actions: stopping evictions, taking over bank branches to negotiate cases … We were totally familiar with the statistics, the data.’ As a consequence, they did not feel the need to investigate the PAH more; their experience as activists sufficed.

Thus, a key feature of the documentary is its ability to convey an alternative discourse about the housing crisis: the PAH’s views. Mainstream narratives produced by the EU, capitalists and media outlets accused the Spanish population of irrational conduct, borrowing excessive money and idle spending beyond control. Due to the 15 M movement and the PAH, the responsibility changed sides. It was corrupt politicians and a deregulated financial sector who took advantage, even in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Grassroots organisations, massive occupations and demonstrations also challenged those powerholders. As the documentary shows, those financially broken went to the PAH with a strong feeling of guilt for not having been able to pay off their mortgage debts. However, this feeling is removed or alleviated once there is solidarity and discussion about the political responsibility of the state in collusion with the financial powers. The usual malpractice of banks and the massive economic support they enjoyed from the government served the PAH to designate the crisis as a ‘scam’. Hence, the PAH came to spearhead alternative interpretations of the economic crisis which enabled grassroots struggles to focus, in particular, on issues of housing justice.

The film manages to represent this context with a specific socio-semiotic resource: The white ‘Day X’ headlines of each segment against a black backdrop summarise the main contents of the story and explicitly frame the scenes to follow. Hence, there is no space for ambiguity. Taken as such, apart from the rest of the film, these framing texts are a consistent critical analysis of the real estate bubble in Spain and the struggle for housing that it triggered. In addition, each of the seven parts includes a short but dense interview with very qualified PAH activists. The interviewees’ speeches are profound and accurate. They know very well the real estate situation in Spain and the main traits of the housing crisis. Moreover, they were the first producers of the counter-hegemonic discourses embraced by the PAH. Among the interviewees, we find Ada Colau (the first PAH spokesperson and the current mayor of Barcelona) and Lucia Martín (Podemos’s former member of parliament and, later, a Barcelona city councillor).

However, instead of inviting the audience to calm reflection about the housing crisis and the deep sorrows of its victims, the message of the documentary is direct, clear and ready-made —something must be done, and it is already being done. Hence, Seven Days also tells how the PAH, in particular, has risen up against those circumstances. This indicates a will to provide useful information about the crucial dimensions of activism in order to appeal to the spectators’ outrage, support and engagement, to say nothing of the replication of the PAH activism model. Accordingly, the images of the PAH’s everyday life give a sense of material and social reality that supplements the textual discourse. In most cases, activists are shown as speakers in assemblies and protest actions. Due to the long-lasting activist engagement of the filmmakers in the PAH, they were even allowed to access very sensitive spaces like mutual aid meetings, where people talked about personal issues such as anxiety, depression, family breakups and other effects of the eviction process.

Another socio-semiotic choice here is the extremely fast pace used to disclose the internal world of the PAH in terms of activists, venues and public spaces. Messages are short but sharp. In this manner, the outsider gets a feeling of familiarity with some of the aspects of a complex political organisation. This is a film with a very fast rhythm, full of short shots and plenty of images representing hectic activism, wide social diversity and the iconic colours and symbols that help identify the PAH. Therefore, the ‘militant’ character of the film is accomplished well. We thus argue that this strategy facilitated the introduction of non-activists to the less visible political and organisational face of the PAH. In addition, it helped many emerging PAH branches to learn the PAH model and consolidate their housing activism.

Sociologically, both the production and dissemination processes of Seven Days show an effective outcome. On the one hand, the directing team did not approach the movement to make the documentary, since they were already part of the movement. They began to participate in the PAH in 2012 with the intention of producing audiovisual content to promote housing campaigns. In fact, they produced most of the PAH’s short clips between 2012 and 2015. Some of those videos had great success if just counted by views on YouTube: ‘Many of our videos became very viral and even became news in and of themselves. Despite being made on a zero-euro budget, they were often reproduced on TV channels and digital media, and were also commented in radio news’. In order to produce a longer and better documentary, Seven Days enjoyed the funding of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, who took the initiative and contacted them. This made the directors think that they had been making videos ‘outwardly’ for many years, to disseminate the campaigns of the PAH. Thus, they decided to use this new opportunity to make a documentary that would focus on the PAH itself and on how it works. ‘In this case we wanted to turn the focus inward, to explain what the PAH looked like in its day-to-day life.’ When they explained the film idea to the PAH in Barcelona, ‘people really supported the project and there was no doubt or resistance from anyone’.

On the other hand, the distribution of the documentary had an initial phase in which the PAH groups and keen organisations screened it widely. It even reached activist groups in New York, Berlin, Dublin and other cities worldwide, inspiring similar struggles. In a second phase, the film was posted on the Internet, and the premiere was announced through a social network campaign that reached a broad audience beyond activist circles. The director was neither interested in screening it at film festivals nor pursuing ways to recover the production costs. Their main goal was not commercial but to let non-housing activists see how the PAH works and the joint ‘humanity and effectiveness’ that makes the PAH a ‘family’. This objective was fulfilled, according to the directing team, both inside and outside the PAH.

Mortgaged Lives and Dignity

An entirely different approach is perceived in the two documentaries produced by Michelle Teran. Both deal with daily life issues, but neither the context of the housing crisis nor activism is at the forefront. The focus is more on personal stories. However, we argue that these intimate ways of filmmaking are also capable of portraying the housing crisis and the grassroots struggles in ways that may profoundly move their audience. Although the director told us she initially had no intention of making an ‘activist film’ or a ‘reportage about evictions’, she increasingly became a participant in a Madrid PAH group starting in 2013, joined blockades, filmed violent evictions that were included in the documentaries and even lived in the occupied building La Dignidad over a three month period.

In terms of the social, political and economic context represented in the films, Mortgaged Lives and Dignity portrayed the intersectional composition of housing activism with more detail and attention than Seven Days. We get to know better who the activists are and the circumstances that led them to both home evictions and taking part in a protest movement. In Mortgaged Lives, for example, most of the portrayed women have a migrant and working-class background. Through the film we do not learn much about their migratory past (mostly from Latin America and Northern Africa) or about their ethnic relations in Spain (especially in the case of the Roma people, many of whom also hold Spanish nationality), but we presume there is an intimate overlap of those social conditions: class (poverty), gender (women) and ethnicity (racialised migrants and ethnic minorities).

As an illustration, in one scene the camera follows three female 40- or 50-plus-year-old activists along a street. A ‘Stop Desahucios’ (Stop evictions) badge is pinned on one of their backpacks. One tells the experience of being evicted, achieving an ‘affordable rent’ in her former house and currently applying for a non-contributory pension of 360 euros per month which ‘is barely nothing’ because she has no income at all. We can also see the three ladies shouting slogans inside the metro. In a pedagogical manner, they explain to another passenger why. They are heading to a Stop Desahucios blockade. One of them, with a marked Latin American accent, tells the story out loud so all the passengers can also hear:

The house doesn’t belong to the bank. It belongs to government bodies that are supposedly obliged to give housing to needy families. The house belongs to the EMVS [the municipal housing company], the IVIMA [the regional housing company] … They are the ones evicting most families… They are paying but their rent is being refused because the city government has sold off blocks of those houses to investors and large shareholders who are stealing from us and making families destitute, not just foreigners, but Spanish families too.

Therefore, it is through the activists’ discourses that the context of oppression is represented. In the film we do not see who the activists’ actual opponents are, those instigating the evictions—property owners, banks and state housing companies. The police only appear as executors of an abstract law that favours banks cheating their clients and neoliberal governments selling off public assets. Judges and the judicial staff are behind the curtains too. The oppressors hide, while the oppressed people must come out in order to resist. The socio-semiotic structure of this narrative implies no moments of joy or celebration. Most faces are serious, sad or crying. However, there is always a sense of conviction and empowerment and a solid political discourse that justifies the protest actions, including nonviolent resistance to the removal of residents at the hands of the police.

Likewise, Dignity focuses on the squatters’ declarations and practices. Through their testimonies we can appreciate the extent of the devastation that has occurred. They include themselves in the category of ‘normal people’ and do not identify with other squatters who are heavily stigmatised by the media. They ‘squat out of necessity, not out of taste’. Nonetheless, squatting as they practise it, regardless of the ‘terrorist’ and ‘anti-system’ labels used by the mass media, is considered ‘the most democratic thing that exists in this country’ because they are ‘making the Spanish Constitution real’, that is, the constitutional principles of the right to housing and the social function of property. Nevertheless, most of these squatters never imagined they would ever be in this situation.

Only a few statements in the beginning of the film help the spectator frame the story of La Dignidad:

Since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, there have been over 550,000 foreclosures in Spain resulting in 180 evictions per day. There are 3.44 million vacant properties throughout the country, many owned by financial institutions who received public bailouts. The Obra Social campaign by the PAH takes over empty buildings owned by banks and use them to rehouse individuals and families with no place to live.

It continues with a quick moving series of images from the Obra Social occupations across the country. These images break with the stereotype of young radical squatters and show the diversity of the people who participate in the squats—people of different ages, from different national and ethnic backgrounds and many women. One of the depicted cases is that of Leonas, a Madrid squat consisting of single mothers with children. The message of this introductory section is just to call attention to the massive, visible and socially diverse wave of housing squats promoted by the PAH over a decade.

In some parts of Dignity activists also participate in various actions. For instance, they join other PAH members and spend the night in the house of a family that is going to be evicted. Another day they protest on the premises of the bank (Bankia) that owns their building. We also see the workshop where activists learn how to open doors and how to squat so that other families can replicate their example. La Dignidad activists were invited to talk at a university event too. Overall, these scenes accurately represent different dimensions of the housing movement to which La Dignidad squat belongs. Despite the emphasis that Teran gives to lived experiences, the broader struggle for housing rights always needs to be recalled.

Notwithstanding, both Dignity and Mortgaged Lives attempt to highlight the politics of care, mutual aid and emotional support that have taken place within the PAH since its inception. Violence is systemic but also embodied and manifested in specific individuals of the oppressed groups. Capital interests and privatisation policies are hidden behind it, which may produce ignorance or frustration, but the collective endeavour of the PAH managed to identify them, name them and self-organise some of their victims in order to confront them. Financial indebtedness, in short, is the underlying structural process that engenders ‘mortgaged lives’, always subjected to social consequences such as stress, fear, violence, traumas and the risk of a ‘social death’ that activists try to halt. Squatting to meet basic housing needs is also shown as a practical and empowering collective response among those, mainly migrant and working-class women who would have been left stranded otherwise.

These two documentaries substantially differ to Seven Days and, to some extent, also The Divide. According to Teran, ‘the psychosocial effects of evictions’ were missing from other documentaries. Mortgaged Lives, for example, focused on the everyday life dimension of the PAH struggle—‘what people experienced on the domestic space in terms of feelings of depression, anxiety, suicidal feelings, domestic abuse’. Hence, Teran intended to represent the painful experience of having ‘life put in boxes’ and ‘put on hold’ after an eviction, but also that of dwelling in a squatted building. Daily chores, the emotional narratives of their homemaking experience and their involvement in housing protests guide the stories.

These dimensions are expressed according to the filmmaker’s artistic criterion above all. In our interview, Teran remarked that she does not see herself as a filmmaker but as an artist: ‘In the PAH assemblies, I was always being referred to as a journalist. My role was never [clear] … I kept on saying that I was an artist… . I just became a person that hangs around.’ Mortgaged Lives began as part of a PhD programme in artistic research in which she was enrolled in Norway from 2010 onwards. In 2013 she went to Madrid and conducted her own research mostly through watching online short clips and documentaries about PAH actions (La Plataforma, Sí se puede, etc.). She met some of the video authors and read El manual de la Obra Social de la PAH (a toolbox and guide to squatting buildings according to the PAH approach). No scientific papers or other books were particularly consulted when making these documentaries, but she regularly followed information about the housing movement in newspapers such as El País and elDiario.es.

After reading the Obra Social manual, she decided to initiate the second documentary—this time Teran had no initial funding (although she later obtained it from a Norwegian art agency). Despite the filmmaker’s temporary engagement in the PAH and the squat, she insisted on considering her position as mainly that of an ‘observer’. Her perspective consisted of ‘slow observations’ by just ‘being present’, as a ‘fly on the wall’, shooting and editing the footage without ‘fixed questions in the beginning’: ‘I don’t like to conduct interviews, and I don’t like to do voice-over. I am interested in what people are saying and how the combination of these voices builds up this conversation… . I am very connected to the direct cinema approach’ (emphasis added). After the preliminary release of Dignity, she consulted her fellow squatters as to what to include in the documentary and what not, who wanted to be in the film and who would like to opt out. The film was thus edited again taking into account their feedback.

Apart from a couple of screenings and public discussions in the United States and Canada, Teran did not put much effort into the distribution of the documentaries because she had to finish her PhD—which included the film Mortgaged Lives—and, afterwards, quickly shifted to new projects. Therefore, there were no screenings addressing PAH groups, and the documentaries became almost unknown for most Spanish activists. Evidence of the latter is their low number of online views: 507 for Mortgaged Lives and 519 for Dignity at the end of 2019.

The Divide

The focus on personal stories, mutual aid and solidarity among people affected by evictions is the narrative strategy of The Divide, which coincides with Mortgaged Lives and Dignity. The difference is that The Divide attempts to also offer an explanatory and politicised discourse in the same fashion as Seven Days. The resistance and struggle of squatters is shown not only through their daily lives and activism but also by clearly disclosing who their opponents are—state authorities, banks, financial investors—and how they behave.

For example, in a demonstration in front of the EMVS, the municipal housing company, a banner is displayed: ‘It’s not suicide, it’s murder. No more evictions!’ One of the women who is interviewed by journalists declares, ‘It’s not the banks but the Madrid city hall who is evicting us. Of course, this is a drama. The murderers behind us just want to privatise.’ There is a lot of press coverage because of the recent suicide of a woman forced to leave her home. Besides other speakers, Dolores addresses the crowd, ‘Since I am in the PAH, I have received a lot of help. I want to tell everyone in a situation like mine that there is help. Don’t collapse. Don’t do anything crazy. You must fight, but do it well. Don’t take your life. We must fight all together.’ These examples indicate that the directors eventually balanced their direct cinema approach with more ‘lecturing’ socio-semiotic resources. Hence, the framing and concluding scenes, in addition to the militant actions in the middle, deviate from the attention to the intimacy of everyday chores, relations, care and suffering.

We also have the opportunity to witness a conversation between a judge and Isa, a squatter who is one of the main characters of the film. The situation appears to have been secretly recorded. The exchange of arguments is very fast. Each party takes a tough stance. Isa argues that they are currently experiencing a serious economic dislocation, so they need more time to find an affordable alternative. Even more, their current house is publicly owned and earmarked for people in need like her so it is nonsense to kick them out. The judge blames the woman for not paying the rent and insists that ‘this is a court; for better or worse, this is not an NGO’. Later on, when facing the eviction day, Isa cries while talking to the press. ‘Don’t cry, Isa,’ says a journalist. ‘I am crying because I am angry. Why are they doing this? We are not criminals. This is our home. There is no justice. If we were rich, this wouldn’t happen.’ Once the police break in, residents and activists are expelled, and a steel door is installed, Isa’s family camps outdoors next to their former building for several weeks. Mattresses, furniture, the fridge, a functioning TV, packed stuff, walls made up of cardboard and a large banner that surrounds them claiming justice with the Stop Desahucios logo are their new home.

What is more, in the final minutes of the film, footage shows a real estate investors’ conference, ‘The Private Equity Fund Forum on Spanish Real Estate’. From the stage, a US investor expresses his concerns, ‘One of the things we heard is that the eviction process can be very time consuming. So, how long is that and how often will it occur?’ His hesitations are responded to by a representative of a Spanish property firm:

The law allows you to ask for additional guarantees of your future tenants. And once you ask that, the criminality rate is really low. For us, who are managing 10,000 apartments all over Spain, the rate is below 1% [That’s great! whispers another speaker]. So, even though it is true that sometimes you must evict people, nowadays it takes time, about three or four months.

The movie finishes with an update about the privatisation of social housing which was referred to at the beginning:

The sale of 4,795 social housing units to Goldman Sachs and Blackstone by the local [both municipal and regional] governments of Madrid is being investigated in court as requested by the PAH. Isabel and her family are still living in the countryside. Since the eviction, little Isabel has been undergoing psychological treatment. Dolores was finally evicted from the home she had occupied for 18 years.

It is no coincidence that the reference to direct cinema (no interviews, no voice-over and no script) is shared by one of the directors of The Divide, Alberto García,¹⁴ and Teran, the director of Mortgaged Lives and Dignity. Both defined their filmmaking approach with the same expression: ´fly on the wall´. They merely intended to behave as witnesses while the final story became scripted during the process of assembling all the collected images. However, the selection also indicates differential emphases to the context. As mentioned, The Divide includes more footage of the real estate market, the judicial trials and the protest actions García had filmed in two previous documentaries also related to social issues, such as migrants arriving in Greece and gentrification in the city centre of Madrid. He acknowledges that there is an activist motivation in his projects, but it is only ´with the camera … ‘I am not the guy who speaks in the assemblies. I rather prefer to film them.’ This also implies a commitment to the professional quality of the audiovisual product, which cannot be replaced with activism according to him. But the collaboration with the PAH activists was always in full accordance and facilitated by the latter.

In terms of previous documentation, the The Divide’s directors did not consult any specific academic publications. They became interested in the PAH because, after the 15 M movement, the PAH ‘became the spearhead in the struggle against injustice and inequality due to the government’s cuts; so it was worthy to portray it’. During the 2012–15 time span of their recording, it was mostly other video clips, especially activist ones such as those of Jaime Alekos, which the directors watched in order to prepare theirs. However, as they admitted, ‘We had not seen anything [related to the PAH] before we initiated La grieta. The first eviction we recorded was in March 2012 in Lavapiés [Madrid city centre].’

Finally, we were told that the main intention of the filmmakers was to show the different stages of the eviction process and the multiple implications for the people going through them. By watching these dramatic circumstances, the directors argued, spectators could get engaged in the struggle against evictions and solidarity could be mobilised. To some extent, we can confirm that this strategy was effective, at least more than Mortgaged Lives and Dignity, but also less practical for organising purposes than Seven Days. The Divide has been widely screened, above all, in film festivals, at home and abroad. All six activists we consulted about this confirmed that this documentary has been widely distributed and discussed among the PAH groups, at least within the Madrid region. Notwithstanding that, some activists also critically remarked that the focus on two personal cases leaves aside the causes and contexts of the financial scam, let alone a nuanced understanding of how the PAH operates.

Conclusions

The four documentaries we have examined here are excellent tools for activism with high quality cinematographic features. However, they use different narrative strategies and have reached different publics. Overall, they represent the housing context and housing activism from distinct angles, so they supplement each other. Their contribution to the housing movement has been evaluated from the double perspective of the production and the dissemination processes. As shown in the previous section, there are also overlaps between the four documentaries, especially in the ways personal dramas of home dispossession are portrayed. However, only Seven Days is more explicitly conceived as an organising tool for activists, while the other three documentaries do a better job in creating empathy among a broader audience who may not know well the depth of the housing crisis and the kind of responses given by grassroots movements.

As we have seen, all the documentaries combine the portrait of activist practices, organisational dynamics, political discourse and lived experiences. The politics of affects, care and solidarity within the PAH is also regularly highlighted. Additionally, with different angles, breadth and depth, these documentaries evince that the Spanish housing crisis has been politically driven by the neoliberal decisions of both central and local governments for the sake of national and global financial corporations. It is this context of neoliberal financialisation, with its specific collective agents, that the Spanish housing movement has questioned and challenged, and it is also represented, either directly or indirectly, in the four documentaries

We argue that these four documentaries can be classified according to two axes: (1) the narrative strategies and socio-semiotic resources that split the films into ‘direct’ and ‘lecturing’ approaches, and (2) the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ spheres of contextual realities that are subject to representation. Despite the different degrees and combinations attempted by each of the scrutinised documentaries, we consider that Seven Days is the film that is more oriented to guide the spectator through the political discourse and practice of the PAH, therefore providing an accurate representation of the workings of housing activism. It consists of a very direct, dynamic and comprehensive portrayal of the PAH as a social movement organisation. It is also rich in arguments, and, somehow, lectures the audience about a complex matter. In our interpretation, this indicates a mobilising strategy. The filmmakers first explain why the PAH is resisting and identify which macro-contextual dimensions of political and economic structures are causing home evictions. They next show the PAH model or method of organising, with the expectation that other activists will follow in their footsteps, both in Spain and elsewhere.

On the other hand, Mortgaged Lives, Dignity, and The Divide focus more on the micro-sphere of lived experiences by common people who became activists almost overnight. Although some direct actions facing police repression are not alien to the scripts of the latter three films, these movies are not seeking to enhance or expand the PAH. Instead, we contend that this strategy rather aims at generating empathy, support and solidarity among a broad audience beyond the activist networks. Direct cinema techniques such as following activists in private situations as if they were the main characters of a novel, or by recording friendly conversations and moments of pain and joy, are at the core of the directors’ cinematographic choices. The heroes of concrete personal and collective stories are thus portrayed as people who were deeply shaken by the global financial crisis, who had no option but to squat and resist home evictions given the material impoverishment they suddenly experienced. Remarkably, The Divide adds more contextual explanations to the narration, while Mortgaged Lives and Dignity offer fewer hints as to the housing and activist contexts, which leaves more room for the spectators’ free understanding of the personal tragedies and political engagement of the protagonists.

An important advantage of Mortgaged Lives, Dignity, and The Divide is that the intimate focus on particular individuals, households and communities allows the underscoring of their intersectional features. Therefore, the working-class, migrants and women come to the forefront of the narration. They are portrayed as real people who experience housing oppression and also who react against it. Either autonomously or with the support of other activists, these social groups experience extreme vulnerability but are also examples of political empowerment. The prominence and frequent leadership of women in assemblies and at actions as well as behaving as spokespersons is striking. Their relationship to the labour market and the management of households, their life stories dedicated to the care of others and the sustainability of close-knit neighbourhoods manifest a relevant dimension of the working-class social conditions of reproduction. The almost ethnographic account of their personal lives helps the directors to justify the activists’ civil disobedience, which could appear as extreme when it comes to squatting, for example. On the contrary, their explicit references to the privatisation of social housing and the aggressive conduct of speculative vulture funds are also barely mentioned, but they may easily be interpreted as distant and, more often than not, faceless evils. By watching these documentaries, however, the public does not learn much about the orchestrated scam and expropriation that took place during the crisis. It is the ‘civic death’ engendered by home evictions as well as the daily operations and dilemmas of housing activism that are better represented in these three documentaries. Seven Days, alternatively, calls the people to arms in order to overcome this social drama and make transparent which organising tools have been successfully tried.

In terms of efficiency in supporting housing activism, Seven Days better serves as a textbook or toolbox that activists can easily remember or imitate. Its impressive mostly non-commercial distribution has widely achieved this goal. The Divide has also been successful in disseminating this housing struggle to a large audience of activists and non-activists alike. It has taken a more professional approach in this regard, although commercial revenues were not necessarily guiding their directors’ strategy. Despite the film not having been conceived of as an organising tool, the directors’ commitment to the housing movement led them to explicitly frame the story with a political discourse similar to that of the PAH. The director of Mortgaged Lives and Dignity also became politically engaged with the PAH and the squatters she lived with. She shared socio-semiotic resources with the directors of The Divide but did not align much with the mainstream features of documentaries channelled through commercial venues and platforms. Mortgaged Lives and Dignity were also hardly known and disseminated because their director immediately shifted her dedication to other artistic projects.

Whereas Seven Days cannot easily appeal to a non-activist audience, the main weakness of Mortgaged Lives and Dignity in terms of outreach is the original way it questions conventional narratives. However, the former manages to coherently craft the main organisational principles of the PAH, and the latter reveal usually hidden aspects of grassroots politics that invite reflection upon the vulnerabilities, contradictions and limitations of housing activism under pressing circumstances. The Divide falls between the other documentaries, with a more balanced combination of the two aforementioned axes, and is capable of triggering the interest of relatively large audiences but rendering it less radical in achieving either mobilising or emotional identification purposes. In sum, nothing is entirely gained by any documentary alone. Nevertheless, we think that every exhibition of these outstanding films triggers a public performance that expands the capacity of the housing movement to claim its legitimacy and to win supporters and activist members.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the projects 11612016-CityU from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong and 2019-00349 from FORMAS (Sweden): Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas.

Notes

1 https://afectadosporlahipoteca.com/

2 For instance, the role of Michael Moore’s documentaries in the rebirth of the genre has been widely discussed (Misiak, 2005). Regarding anti-copyright platforms to visualise critical films see, for example: www.filmsforaction.org, https://archive.org, https://christiebooks.co.uk/anarchist-film-archive, https://www.naranjasdehiroshima.com/

3 See also her own documentary productions at https://shannonwalsh.ca/

4 https://www.dispossessionfilm.com/

5 https://www.busno8.com/

6 http://www.pushthefilm.com/

7 https://vimeo.com/323297000

8 https://vimeo.com/105546119

9 https://vimeo.com/201434221

10 https://filmfreeway.com/1387634

11 Despite the decline of media attention after 2015, the yearly figure of effective property repossessions (of which around 80% were home evictions) was very high even after 2015 (40,740 cases in 2011; 64,902 in 2015; 56,230 in 2018): http://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Temas/Estadistica-Judicial/Estudios-e-Informes/Efecto-de-la-Crisis-en-los-organos-judiciales/

12 http://www.joaap.org/press/mortgagedlives.html

13 We interviewed Pau Faus, the director of Seven Days, and Silvia González, one of the members of Comando Video, which is made up of PAH activists closely involved in the filmmaking process.

14 He held an after-screening discussion with participants of the SqEK (Squatting Everywhere Kollective) conference in October 2019. He also responded to a short questionnaire we sent him some months later.