Earlier this year Barcelonas MACBA ran a retrospective on a forgotten chapter of Spain’s cinematic history. It was called Quinquis: Cinema, Press and Street, and focused on underground urban cinema of the 1980′s that reflected a stylised reality of a generation of lost teenagers.
Almost all of this cinema’s teenage stars were non-professional actors from the same backgrounds the films talked about – estates on the edge of Spain’s big cities, where high unemployment and the suddenly permissive social and political atmosphere of the Transition led to an influx of drugs, music, and underground lifestyles.
The films sit somewhere between British Kitchen Sink cinema, and Video Nasties, and document a subculture that ran in parallel to but has been eclipsed by the shinier, more exuberant cinema of La Movida.