From El 47 and La Infiltrada to Los Domingos and Sorda: What has changed in Spanish cinema in just one year
By Patricia del Amo · Research Consultant at GAD3.
In a cultural landscape dominated by niche markets, algorithms and fragmented consumption, very few events still manage to capture widespread, shared attention. The Goyas remain one of them. The 2026 ceremony attracted an average of 2,396,000 viewers, achieved a 26% audience share (its best figure since 2020) and generated more than 235,000 interactions on RTVE’s social media alone. At a time when we are watching more and more different things on different screens, Spanish cinema retains, at least for one night, the ability to place itself at the centre of the cultural conversation.
And this is all the more significant when viewed against the backdrop of cinema attendance. Footfall has been declining for years, and the habit of going to the cinema faces increasing competition from streaming platforms and more home-based audiovisual consumption. Even so, Spanish cinema’s box office takings exceeded €85 million in 2024 and continue to rise.
Javier García wrote about this on his blog, which you can access by clicking here.
The question is: when that happens, what sort of stories end up taking their place? What does that tell us about our country and, by extension, about ourselves?
From 2025 to 2026: it’s not just the films that change, but the perspective
If we compare some of the films that defined the 2025 Goyas with those of 2026, what emerges is not merely a succession of titles or names, but something deeper: a shift in the way we view ourselves. Comparing El 47 and La infiltrada with Los domingos or Sorda is to compare two ways of understanding cinema, but also two ways of understanding the present.
On the one hand, both films from the 2025 Goyas were built around visible conflict, history, power, politics and the mechanisms that organise collective life. They are films where the story carries weight, where the narrative drives forward with force and where the characters are shaped by historical or social forces that propel them. There is in them a desire to explain a conflict and to organise reality into a story. And this is also reflected in the form: tightly structured scripts, dramatic progression, a mise-en-scène at the service of the conflict, and a narrative that seeks to make reality legible. It is a cinema that looks at Spain from the outside, through its structures and major tensions.
However, in Los domingos or Sorda, the focus seems to shift. Both operate on a different scale. They are films that appear smaller in scope, quieter, more intimate, more attuned to relationships, identity and discomfort: to the feeling of not fitting into the world. Here, conflict no longer always takes the form of a major event; sometimes it plays out in a conversation, in a shared living situation, or in the way one exists within a family, a couple, or a place. It is no longer so much about recounting what is happening in Spain as it is about showing how people live within it. Stories rooted in everyday life thus take on greater weight: less epic, less grand narrative, more concrete experience.
The social on a 1:1 scale
This shift is best understood through the lens of sociology and, more specifically, through the theories of Eva Illouz. It is not a retreat into the private sphere. It is not that Spanish cinema has abandoned social issues in favour of personal angst. Rather, it is that many of the structural tensions of our time are expressed through the language of emotional life. The family, the couple, communication, identity and fragility are not here minor issues or apolitical refuges; they are the spaces where inequalities, dependencies and very specific ways of experiencing the present are condensed. The social does not disappear: it changes scale.
Cinema as a sociological element
Thirty years from now, anyone wishing to understand what Spain was like in this decade will be able to consult newspaper archives, statistics, legislation or speeches. There they will find the figures, the crises, the debates and the headlines. But to understand something more elusive what form uncertainty or everyday life took they may have to sit down and watch these films. Because that is where a society ceases to be mere information and becomes an experience. And that is where cinema ceases to be merely culture and becomes a historical document.
Viewing figures and audience data from RTVE.
Revenue figures from the INE
