The visual strategies of struggle: domestic workers in hybrid filmic forms of confronting reality in Spain (2000-2020)

This article studies the critical and activist documentaries produced in Spain in the last twenty years that address the situation of invisibility and exploitation of domestic workers and hotel maids. In these films, the features of labor struggles permeate the filmic construction. These documentaries are characterized by the work on the dialectic invisibility-visibility –typical of their trade unions functioning– and by the use of expressive strategies to translate their working conditions to the film, concomitant with their ways of organizing the labor struggle: the choral account, the collective creation and the inclusion in film of their everyday life and families. These documentaries flee from the usual paternalistic view in commercial film productions. The sample of six films deploys an arc that reveals the advance of female precariousness from the Franco regime since nowadays, highlighting audiovisual productions increase since the irruption of the collective mobilizations of hotel maids. The films present a hybrid nature typical of the feminist, militant, and class documentary, confronting the hegemonic modes of representation, production, and distribution.