This month the HSBC Spanish Film Festival 2025 is touring eight Australian cities, showcasing a range of new Spanish and Latin American films. The centrepiece of this year’s festival is five-time Goya Award-winning drama The 47 (El 47), co-written and directed by Marcel Barrena. It is a beautifully crafted and very effective true-life drama, with great performances and enormous emotional appeal. Fans of quality international cinema should check it out when it premieres in a couple of weeks.

The 47 focuses on Barcelona bus driver Manolo Vital (Eduard Fernández). In the 1950s he emigrated from his homeland of Extremadura in central-west Spain to Catalonia, where he joined a ramshackle shanty town of refugees and cultural minorities on a steep hillside outside of the city. By 1978 his improvised shack is a properly constructed house – although it has perennial issues with leaks, running water, and power supply – and each day he makes the long journey into Barcelona’s centre to drive the number 47 bus. The community of Torre Baró continues to lack proper infrastructure or receive support from the city government. As the situation worsens, Manolo is driven to take matters into his own hands.

The film tells a very familiar story, and broadly hits a very predictable series of beats. While one could criticise The 47 for playing things very safe, its strength lies in its integrity. This is an open and honest drama, with a strong sense of social justice and a set of warm and readily identifiable characters. While it is based on a true story, and captures a specific period of recent Spanish history, the struggles it depicts are largely universal.

Eduard Fernández is excellent as the gruff, reluctant Manolo, and cements the film in an authentic and sympathetic experience. His very grounded, familiar persona is a solid anchor through which the film can express varying degrees of comedy, tragedy, and some particularly harsh satire of government bureaucracies. Clara Segura is also particularly strong as Manolo supportive wife Carmen, who abandoned life as a nun when she fell in love with him.

By focusing solely on Manolo, and the real man’s personal act of rebellion against the Barcelona government, The 47 does fictionalise the real events to some extent. The crusade to bring the city’s amenities and services to Torre Baró was obviously a group effort by a whole community, and to an extent the film lays an inordinate amount of credit at Manolo’s feet at the expense of his neighbours. It is an artefact of this sort of mainstream, populist drama: the audience benefits from a primary viewpoint, and it honestly does make for a more streamlined, enjoyable experience. That it is partially an invention is simply worth keeping in mind.

The 47 is an outstanding popular drama, boasting strong performances, a well-crafted script, and strong production values. It presents a bleak, miserable situation, and then shines a crowd-pleasing ray of hope right through it.