EL47

THREE AND A HALF STARS City officials said a bus could never reach a neighbourhood behind Barcelona. Manolo said otherwise.

DRAMA SPAIN Spanish #EL47 Starring Eduardo Fernández, Clara Segura

The Spanish transition after Franco’s death isn’t exactly overrepresented on screen – at least for audiences outside Spain – which gives EL47 a spark of freshness from the get-go. Writer-director Marcel Barrena (MEDITERRÁNEO) takes us high into the hills behind Barcelona to Torre Baró, a once-forgotten slum that got itself a bus route thanks to one determined man.

He is Manolo Vital (Eduard Fernández), a community leader and bus driver who decided his neighbours deserved better than a two-hour trek by foot to work or school. The city council said it couldn’t be done. Manolo proved them wrong.

Barrena’s script can run a bit hot - the political bite sometimes veers into polemic - but he knows how to keep the heart of the story intact. The result is an unexpectedly engaging mix of melodrama, history lesson and underdog yarn.

Vital’s fight with the bureaucrats is grounded in a broader reality: forced migration in the years after Franco’s death. An Extremaduran by birth, Catalan by adoption, Manolo is a man who sees the bus not just as transport, but as a mobile meeting place - a community on wheels.

Barrena leans into a sense of a city on the cusp. Vital, and thousands like him, weren’t just passengers on that journey, they were the bridge between Spain’s fractured past and its modern future.

Fernández is excellent in the lead, backed by the ever-reliable Clara Segura as his ex-nun wife, and Carlos Cuevas as a sympathetic city administrator. Together they carry a story that’s both local and universal – about how something as ordinary as a bus route can quietly change the shape of a city, and how migration, in a hundred small ways, changes the shape of a country.

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