7th session: Thursday 31 January, 7.45-9 h
Joan Miquel Gual and Blanca Gutiérrez (Punt 6 feminist town-planning collective)
Film discussion group El poble desnonat 
 

‘I do it because I’ve got balls’. Benito (played by a very young Javier Bardem) sometimes makes you laugh, sometimes makes you angry and sometimes arouses compassion. He’s an outrageous, eccentric nouveau-riche, one of the many who made their fortune during the first housing cycle of the democratic period (1985-1992). A true Iberian male, with delusions of grandeur, a Julio Iglesias fanatic, who builds buildings like phalluses, the higher the better, to show off his attributes and his determined wish to join the select club of the gentlemen of the boom.

The protagonist of Golden Balls (Bigas Luna, 1993) is moved by a profound lovesickness. In fact, one of the main topics it deals with has currently taken off: the crisis and fragility of classical masculinities.

The film brings the Spanish horror story up to date. Filmed in Benidorm, a corrupt symbol of the town-planning and tourist bubble since the Franco era, it holds up a distorted mirror that reflects reality critically. For this reason, we shall stretch the film and put it in a dialogue with the ideas and initiatives of the Punt 6 feminist town-planning collective, an organisation whose practices and projects are diametrically opposed to the predominant model of city in Spain.

Joan Miquel Gual is a member of Memòria en Moviment (Memory in Movement), a housing activist at La Borda SCCL, Lecturer in History of the Cinema at the UOC and curator of the series ‘El poble desnonat’ (The Evicted People).

Blanca Gutiérrez is a sociologist and a member of the Col·lectiu Punt 6 (Punt 6 feminist town-planning collective), an organisation that works in architecture and town-planning from the point of view of intersectional gender, sustainability, participation and community actions, and the solidarity economy.