A Quantitative Study of Ageing and Rural Space in Spanish Cinema

AGE-C’s Luis Freijo has published a new academic output in the context of the project entitled ‘Envejecmiento y mundo rural en el cine Espanol contemporaneo: un acercamiento de datos cuantitativo’. The publication is a book chapter, written in Spanish, that is included in the volume Inteligencia Artificial, criterio y relacion: Transformaciones eticas y pedagogicas en los ecosistemas digitales. The book is published with the Spanish academic publisher Dykinson, edited by Miguel Ángel García Madurga y Ana Mancho de la Iglesia, and constitutes an attached output to the ‘XI Congreso Internacional Comunicación e Información Digital. Diálogos y conexiones en la era de la IA relacional’, celebrated at the University of Zaragoza in October 2025.

The chapter studies the representation of ageing in the context of rural space in contemporary Spanish cinema. In this way, it brings together two topics of urgent presence in public debate in Spain, that of the ageing of the population, and that of the de-population and disproportionate ageing of the rural environment, especially in the centre of the country. The chapter draws on the AGE-C dataset to effectuate a quantitative reading of ageing in rural space, which includes diversity of the ageing characters represented, and a thematic and generic reading of both fiction and documentary films. The study concludes that Spanish cinema shows an increasing concern about and presence of the two topics combined. The majority of ageing characters that appear connected to the rural space are heterosexual men between 60 and 75 years of age, which puts the focus on themes such as leisure and economic activities, especially through self-employed agricultural work, and there is therefore less presence of vulnerable groups such as ageing women or people over 75 years of age. However, documentaries pay more attention to themes that have to do with personal memory or caregiving.

In this way, the chapter becomes part of the output of quantitative studies about ageing and cinema derived from the AGE-C dataset. It can be read in Open Access in the following link: