While vastly different in tone, scope, and geography, El 47 and Through Rocks and Clouds (titled Raíz in Spanish) offer complementary visions of resistance – one overtly political, the other quietly poetic. Together, they provide a rich entry point into contemporary Spanish and Indigenous language cinema, balancing crowd-pleasing drama with subtle, art-house storytelling.

At once intimate and epic, El 47, directed by Marcel Barrena, resurrects a little-known act of defiance from Spain’s democratic transition and restores its urgency, warmth, and weight. In 1978, Barcelona bus driver Manolo Vital hijacked his own vehicle (‘the 47’ that gives the title to the film) and drove it up to Torre Baró, a neighbourhood so neglected it lacked running water, electricity, and public transport. That true story is just the epilogue of a far deeper narrative of generational struggle for dignity, set against silence and stone.

The film opens decades before 1978, with refugees from across Spain arriving in the Catalan hills after Franco’s war. In the brown-grey palette of this slum-scape, everything is raw: mud, hunger, exhaustion. Barrena frames the scene like a living version of Pelizza da Volpedo’s nineteenth-century painting, Il Quarto Stato, a slow procession of workers pushing back against erasure. The newcomers, among them a young Manolo and his baby daughter Joana, are told they may build homes overnight. If unfinished by dawn, police will demolish them. And so they do: one house per night, together.

What emerges is not just survival but solidarity. The people of Torre Baró, bound by hardship and perseverance, form a makeshift republic of mutual care. Their unity, far from sentimental, becomes a source of practical resistance – and the film honours this with clarity and tenderness.

The time-jump to 1978 reveals that little has changed. Torre Baró remains disconnected – geographically, politically, emotionally – from the rest of Barcelona. Manolo is now older, still making his punishing daily descent into the city to drive Bus 47. Down there, the streets are smooth, the lights steady, the world vivid. Up the hill, everything remains precarious: deliveries fail, children grow illiterate, families live forgotten lives. ‘Torre Baró es [is] Barcelona!’ becomes the rallying cry of a people barely recognised.

Barrena avoids sentimentalism by grounding the drama in detail: the blisters on Carmen’s feet, the sacks Felipín must carry on his own back, the mould on bedroom walls. Through Eduard Fernández’s quietly astonishing performance, we feel the fatigue of injustice not shouted, but endured. He gives us a Manolo who is no saint but simply someone who cannot bear the humiliation any longer.

Eduard Fernández as Manolo Vital (courtesy of A Contracorriente Films)

El 47 recalls Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Sacro GRA (2013), another love letter to the peripheries, where marginality and humanity coexist. Like Rosi, Barrena gives us not a monologue but a chorus of neighbours, histories, and contradictions. The deep humanity of Torre Baró shines through every frame, heart-wrenching and heart-warming at once.

The visual and emotional density of El 47 is striking. The neighbourhood unfolds vertically: houses are stacked atop one another on the steep hill, people are crammed into tight spaces, and the daily journey downward into the city echoes Sisyphus’s punishment. The film’s textures are saturated with colour, tension, and physical compression. It is a world of ascent and descent, of constant striving.

It is this vertical intensity that finds its haunting counterpoint in Through Rocks and Clouds, a film of quiet horizontality and open breath. Winner of five Goya Awards including Best Film, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Special Effects, and Best Production Design, El 47 was also nominated in ten categories at the 2025 Gaudí Awards and won eight, including Best Film, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and the coveted Audience Award. This is a film of rare balance: stirring but never forced, political but never preachy. It reminds us how systems fail by forgetting, and how resistance can begin with a single act of visibility. It is a masterpiece of quiet rebellion.

If El 47 traces a collective cry for inclusion, Through Rocks and Clouds (2024) stages a quiet refusal. Where one community demands visibility, another braces for its erasure. Franco García Becerra’s début feature is an understated, deeply local work set in the Andean highlands of Peru. Its resonance, however, is unmistakably global, especially for Australian audiences attuned to the politics of land, heritage, and extractive industry.

Shot almost entirely in Quechua with non-professional actors, Through Rocks and Clouds (its Spanish title, Raíz, meaning ‘root’ in Spanish) renders its world with a sense of interior truth rarely found in contemporary cinema. It is the story of eight-year-old Feliciano (Alberth Merma), a Quechua boy who tends to his alpaca, Ronaldo, and dreams of playing in his village football team. That simple dream unfolds under the growing shadow of a mining company, whose advance onto ancestral territory is never directly confrontational but always looming. The threat is diffuse, ambient, and real.

What might initially appear folkloric or distant quickly reveals itself acutely political. The film’s conflict is not just about land rights, but about cosmology – about the way of life, time, and connection to earth that is being dissolved by a more mechanised, transactional world. Walking between these two realms is the quiet spirit of Auki Tayta, the Andean deity who watches over nature and community. Though never foregrounded, this ancestral presence is felt in the rhythms of the film itself, which follow the pulse of the mountain more than any narrative clock.

Merma’s performance is luminous in its ordinariness; he inhabits the character with lived precision. Feliciano’s relationship with Ronaldo is tender and symbolic. The landscape, captured in Johan Carrasco’s breathtaking cinematography, is not just scenery but sentient space – snowcapped, infinite, and painfully alive. The opening shot, in which the camera exhales into the horizon, evokes the metaphysical quiet of Luigi Ghirri’s photography.

As with Rosi’s Sacro GRA, Through Rocks and Clouds dwells in the geographical margins. It pays close, unflinching attention to lives from outside the city’s gravitational pull, where nothing is romanticised yet everything pulses with meaning. Like Rosi, García Becerra offers not a polemic but a love letter – one that whispers rather than proclaims.

The film’s thematic duality is striking. The outside world is both wondrous and corrosive: through Feliciano’s eyes, Peru’s chance to qualify for the 2018 World Cup is exhilarating. Yet this same world brings bulldozers, broken promises, and erasure. Through Rocks and Clouds never resolves this tension; instead, it honours its complexity with quiet force.

Winner of the Ibero-American Competition Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival, and recipient of a Special Mention in the Generation KPlus section at Berlinale 2024 and an Official Selection at the 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival, Through Rocks and Clouds has been rightly celebrated on the international festival circuit. It is not a parable of activism, but an elegy – unfolding in the breath-thin air between earth and sky, myth and memory.

EL 47 (A Contracorriente Films) and Through Rocks and Clouds (Luxbox Films) are part of the Spanish Film Festival which continues in Melbourne until 2 July 2025.