Resumen de ‘It takes a village to raise a child’: Rural motherhoods and new maternal discourses in contemporary Spanish film

Sofía Otero Escudero, Irene Baena-Cuder

• Between 2021 and 2022, several Spanish films focused on motherhood were released, featuring rural settings reimagined as a ‘motherland’. This research analyses seventeen films from this period, exploring constructions of rural motherhood from a gender perspective. It examines the social implications of these portrayals within archetypes shaped since the Franco era. It also analyses new elements and their ties to Spain’s recent past. The study identifies categories of rural mothers differentiated by age, offering more realistic and demystified representations that depart from Francoist ideals. However, they remain iconographically normative, depicting cisgender, white, heterosexual and biological mothers.