Cinema as Territorial Media Discourse: A Diachronic and Sociodemographic Study of Rural Migration in the Province of Girona (Catalonia, Spain)

This article examines how Spanish rural cinema functions as a media dispositif—understood, following the Foucauldian concept as operationalised in media studies, as an apparatus of heterogeneous practices, discourses and institutional arrangements that produces and governs representations—for the construction and circulation of territorial imaginaries, thereby participating in the media ecosystem of public debates on depopulation, migration and multicultural coexistence. Through a diachronic and sociodemographic comparison of La piel quemada (Josep Maria Forn, 1967) and Suro (Mikel Gurrea, 2022)—two feature films set in the province of Girona (Catalonia, Spain) but separated by 55 years and opposing migratory pressures—the study analyses how audiovisual fiction produces, challenges and renegotiates the dominant sociodemographic imaginaries of two distinct historical conjunctures: the developmentalist boom of late Francoism and the neo-rural turn of the early twenty-first century. A qualitative chronotopic methodology is applied to 18 systematically selected sequences from both films, organised around three contextualising axes (historical, territorial, sociodemographic). The central original contribution is the concept of the media–geographic diptych as an instrument for diachronic comparative analysis of rural cinema as a media form. Secondary contributions include evidence that the two media texts analysed construct an imaginary of structural continuity of xenophobia in the rural territorial discourse of Girona and a theoretical proposal on cinematic multilingualism as an under-theorised territorial media practice. The discussion situates these findings within current debates on rural cosmopolitanism, overtourism and the media construction of la España vaciada, and offers preliminary evidence that audiovisual fiction occupies a differentiated position in the media ecology of territorial public discourse that merits systematic attention in future studies.