El Documental del mes - BARRAQUES. La ciutat oblidada - el Documental del mes

At the beginning of the sixties, about a hundred thousand people lived in shacks in Barcelona. They had arrived from many areas of Spain, avoiding the misery and the post-war political persecution. In Barcelona, they did not find another place to live than caves and fragile houses which were improvised with the materials that they found. The shantytowns kept growing. There were El Somorrostro and El Camp de la Bota on the beaches, and the multiple shantytowns of Montjuïc or El Carmel on the hills. But there were also shacks in La Diagonal or L’Eixample. The slum dwellers lived many years in bad conditions, fearful of their houses were demolished and exposed to the weather conditions, as the storms of the sea that devastated the shacks of the coast.
People who lived in shacks were workers, but the city was often unaware of that reality, so hard and at the same time so near. As time went by, the shantytowns were demolished and suburbs were built in the outskirts. In many cases, the houses were built too much quickly.
In Barraques. La ciutat oblidada, the voice of the protagonists and a great number of audiovisual documents make us revive some very difficult years. The old slum dwellers think that the past must not be forgotten and less now, when the housing is a severe problem again for so many people.
Barraques. La ciutat oblidada was born as a report for the TV3 program “30 minuts”. In the area of Documentaries, for the program called “Sense ficció”, the documentation was extended to be able to recreate that city of the shacks that new Barcelona of the design has wanted to forget, with more witnesses and archival images. However, the film arrives before to the theatres of The Documentary of the Month.

Sara Grimal and Alonso Carnicer are reporters of TV3. They have carried out together reports and documentaries about the urban transformations of the territory through the time, the patrimony, the memory and the landscape. One of their works is the documentary series Retrats d'indians, about the mark of the collective memory and architectonic patrimony of those that returned from America and Retorn a l'Edèn, about the creation of landscapes in the urban context. They have collaborated in the news program with reports as El paisatge de la cançó and Els senyals del temps about the culture of the rural world, and reports for the program called “30 Minuts” such as Marcats pel temps about the relationship between the people, the annual cycle and the climate, and El valor d'un paisatge about the current transformation of the territory.