Dialogues between fiction and documentary movies: how Rocío and La Isla Mínima talk about the deep Francoist’s mark in Spain

Abstract

Throughout this paper, we come up with a dialogue between a documentary film and a fiction film with the aim of highlighting, through their common points, different aspects of Spain’s Transition. We consciously make this difference between both genres because fiction cinema does not need a previous pre-existing reality and therefore is self-sufficient in its narration, while documentary cinema does need tangible facts to be able to achieve its objectives (Rodríguez Merchán, 1994). We have chosen Rocío (1980) as a key film that also represents a tremendous judicial persecution for its author due to the issues discussed in the documentary. As a fictional counterpart, La Isla Mínima (2014), serves to denounce many structural aspects of Francoism that were still in force in the Spanish Transition. We understand that rural cinema is an especially favorable framework to establish a dialogue between fiction and non-fiction and through this border, to be able to establish a series of reflections based on the historical period in which Rocío was filmed and which matches with the chronology in which La Isla Mínima is set. Via this comparative analysis, we focus on an episode of Spain’s recent history through films as a strategy for historical analysis.