Introduction

Chapter One conducts a close reading of Demonios en el jardín (Demons in the Garden) (Gutiérrez Aragón 1982) and, to a lesser degree, incorporates the documentaries Los niños de Rusia (The Children of Russia) (Camino 2001) and Els nens perduts del franquisme (Franco's Forgotten Children) (Armengou, Belis and Vinyes 2002), in order to illuminate the historical context of the stolen children of Franco and set the stage for the broader biopolitics of Francoism. Demonios en el jardín depicts the two Spains through a family split between the victorious, his conservative grandmother, and the vanquished, his single mother. The black marketeer grandmother's quashed efforts to reunite the family offer an alternative to Francoism by rejecting its genre strategy of promoting unity.

Marsha Kinder's 1983 essay, ‘The Children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema’, identifies a trend in films from 1973 to 1980 by directors – José Luis Borau (1929–2012), Víctor Erice (1940–), Carlos Saura (1932–), Jaime de Armiñán (1927–), Jaime Chávarri (1943–), and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (1940–) – who were children during Francisco Franco's regime (1939–75) and whose features depict sensitive, precocious, and even murderous children and stunted, childlike adults. Including Gutiérrez Aragón's La camada negra (Black Litter) (1977), Kinder draws a parallel between the filmmakers of the New Spanish Cinema and their cinematic progeny: