The representation of the forest in Koldo Serra’s Bosque de sombras (2006)

In this article, I undertake an analysis of the Spanish film, Bosque de sombras/The Backwoods in order to explore the shifting representations of the forest in the national cinema. I suggest that, during the dictatorship and the period of the transition following Franco’s death, the forest was utilized by film-makers as a site in which to express subversive political ideas. In the twentieth century, this rich tradition continues and yet, as the film which is used here as a case study demonstrates, with a significantly altered perspective. Rather than returning to the same denunciation of Falangist policies that had been the hallmark of much earlier Spanish cinema, el cine del bosque has now become a medium through which film-makers can explore more contemporary anxieties about masculine and regional/national identities, a focus of particular interest, given the current debate about an independent Catalan state.