The film El 47 reconstructs an act of peaceful community rebellion that in the 20th century was carried out by the “invisibles” of Torre-Baró, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona where thousands of migrants arrived, fleeing the misery of the post-war period. The film goes beyond the recreated true events and shows that dignity is not something abstract, but is realized in the struggle for water, for light, or a bus line, in this case. That action invites a bioethical reflection on the community dimension of the person, as well as on inequality and the fracture of solidarity by marginalizing the most fragile on the outskirts of cities.
Catalan filmmaker Marcel Barrena transforms the origins of the working-class neighbourhood of Torre-Baró, on the outskirts of Barcelona, into a microcosm of the suffering and desperation of thousands of families from Andalusia and Extremadura who, in the 1950s and 1960s, were forced by hunger to abandon their land and seek a more prosperous life in industrialised areas of the Basque Country, Madrid or Catalonia. Buying small plots of land on the outskirts of cities, shanty towns, and subletting became the only option for most migrants who lacked sufficient financial resources to be able to rent a home in the heart of the cities. This is how the first settlements of shacks and cabins appeared in Spain, built by the families themselves, under the protection of a crazy state law that stipulated that, if the building was roofed at dawn, it could not be demolished by the authorities.
In the film, Manolo Vital (Eduard Fernández), recently widowed, arrives from Valencia de Alcántara (Extremadura) to Torre-Baró in 1958 with his daughter Joana (Zoe Bonafonte), who is barely two years old at the time. Like hundreds of families, he invests all his savings in bricks, cement, wooden planks and corrugated iron to build a small and precarious building with his own hands, in order to protect themselves from the elements. Every night, hundreds of families work hard. But, at daybreak, no one has managed to roof their house and the Benemérita – as the Civil Guard was popularly called – arrives with a legion of bricklayers who, with hammer blows, destroy the buildings and, at the same time, the hopes of those who hope for good, but only receive insult in response.
A heroic community
Community heroism and the hope of the desperate arise, paradoxically, in that space of bitterness and collective pain. Manolo Vital proposes to put aside individual interest and not continue investing energy in the useless effort of building each one his own house. In this sense, he proposes that the community join forces collectively to build, each night, a single roofed house that, by complying with the bizarre legality, cannot be demolished. Everyone must commit to this joint effort until the last of the families had their house finished. “And which one will be the first?” asks the most distrustful. “Yours,” replies the protagonist to stifle selfishness and instill confidence in the goodness of the proposal. The strength of the neighborhood union raises a stigmatized neighborhood, Torre-Baró, which does not appear on any map of the city and, in addition, constitutes a space forbidden to the most basic rights of citizenship.
After this sequence, the film jumps forward twenty years in time. In 1978, Manolo Vital works as a driver for the metropolitan urban public transport company, driving the bus line 47, and has married Carmen (Clara Segura), a teacher who is in charge of teaching children to read in a barracks and also of teaching literacy to the women of the neighbourhood, who, for the most part, cannot read or write. In addition, he constantly quarrels with his daughter Joana, who, like many of the young people who have grown up there, is ashamed of living in the neighbourhood and suffers the contempt of her classmates and the stigma of her place of residence every day. The neighbours are the same ones who built the houses, but the community struggle for better living conditions has not ended. “Nobody cares about us, they treat us like animals and we are people (…) we are tired of coming and, now, tired of staying.” This is a lament shared at the meetings of the neighbours of Torre-Baró. The only sign of “progress” in the neighbourhood is an old telephone booth, in the middle of a small unpaved square. This is, precisely, the place of spontaneous solidarity, where people share the little they have and where each neighbour goes with his chair to watch one of the films that are shown once a week on an old white sheet that acts as a cinema screen.
Torre-Baró barely has running water, people carry butane bottles on their backs for kilometres, walk hours to get to the nearest health centre, to work or to study in the city centre and there is no shortage of candles in the houses because power cuts and breakdowns are the order of the day. The neighbours, fed up with the neighbourhood being a zone of marginality and exclusion, are planning to demand that the City Council bring public transport to the area. Manolo Vital leads the act of peaceful community dissent to try to demonstrate, at the wheel of bus number 47, that politicians and technicians are wrong when they deny the request of the residents, alleging that the streets are too narrow and steep for a vehicle of that size to pass. “Dignity is not something abstract, it is the fight for water, for light, for mail, for public education (…) We are isolated behind a mountain and we need the bus to reach the outskirts as you call us (…) I am a good driver and I myself am committed to driving that bus,” proposes the protagonist, encountering in his odyssey a faceless bureaucracy, incapable of listening or seeing people as ends in themselves.
Manolo Vital is not alone. He has the support of his family, his neighbors, and even the regular travelers of line 47 who, over the years, have forged bonds of trust and friendship with the driver. The neighborhood leader “hijacks” his own bus, with the approval of the passengers—middle and upper class city dwellers—attracted by the feat of bringing transportation to an area they didn’t know existed. The heroism of the action is characterized by the exemplary commitment to a just cause, by personal sacrifice and by a genuine and clear orientation of service to others. The act of rebellion thus becomes a catalyst for change that transforms the characters, makes the inhabitants of the neighborhood proud and strikes the heart of the spectator. The philosopher Josep María Esquirol alludes to solidarity with others and the donation of oneself as a source of vital meaning and a demand that we cannot escape. “The deepest solidarity is that of consciences (…) It is impossible for it not to be linked to action and to the transformation of the situation.”[1]
The true story of the first bus that arrives to a migrant neighborhood in Barcelona thanks to the strength of the union of people is made of these elements. Given the power of the plot and the narrative, it is not surprising that the film is about to be considered one of the best films of Spanish cinema in 2024, has swept the Gaudí awards and faces the Goya awards with fourteen nominations. It should be noted that Marcel Barrena’s film has many points in common with the humanist cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, which is currently a reference in Europe for its commitment to welcoming fragility and its fight against the culture of waste.
Cities of the rich and cities of the poor
Cities of the rich and cities of the poorThe film El 47, beyond recreating true events, refers to current events and calls for a bioethical reflection on two relevant issues: on the one hand, the importance of interrelationship; and on the other, the projection of cities as spaces of inclusion or exclusion of fragility, inequality between rich and poor and fracture of solidarity. The ethical myopia of politics and strong economic interests seem to have important and precise responsibilities in aspects that are key such as the right to the city, access to housing in decent conditions and the configuration of cities as spaces of social, cultural integration and community life, instead of as a powerful machine of marginalization and exclusion.
Urban and territorial policy are an unavoidable part of visions and actions of biopolitics or social bioethics that have to do with fundamental human rights, protection of human life, in addition to reasons of social justice and charity. “A wall is a wall, but its meaning, use and role are different when it serves to protect against the elements or noise, to delimit a garden or to separate the plague-ridden from the rest of the city and to create areas in which different legal principles are established,” says the humanist architect Bernardo Secchi[2]. Indeed, as the protagonist of this film, Manolo Vital, shouts, dignity is not abstract and wealth and poverty are not measured only in terms of income. Poor is not only the person or family with low income, but also the one who cannot access, even potentially, to enjoy goods and services essential for survival and social integration.
Bauman, for his part, emphasizes that being poor means being excluded from what is considered a “normal life”; it is “not being up to par with others.” This generates feelings of shame or guilt. Poverty also implies having closed opportunities for a “happy life”[3].
Adela Cortina describes as a radical evil, inciting intolerance and hatred by hiding the poor in the outskirts of cities because they do not seem to have much to offer in the exchange society. The philosopher speaks of moral corruption due to the growing willingness to admire the rich and the great, despising and ignoring the most fragile[4].
From this, it can be inferred that it is urgent for social, housing and territorial planning policies to be oriented towards the inclusion and acceptance of fragility as an unavoidable responsibility towards one’s neighbour and towards the centrality of the person if we want to recognise ourselves as human and not undermine the community experience. This is essential to enhance human life.
Amparo Aygües – Master’s Degree in Bioethics from the Catholic University of Valencia – Member of the Bioethics Observatory – Catholic University of Valencia
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[1] Esquirol, J. Mª. (2017). Oneself and others. From existential experiences to interculturality. Herder, p. 104.
[2] Secchi, B. (2015). The city of the rich and the city of the poor. Catarata, p. 39.
[3] Bauman, Z. (2000). Work, consumerism and the new poor. Gedisa.
[4] Cortina, A. (2017). Aporophobia, the rejection of the poor. Paidós.
