Documental, industria y compromiso : la inmigración subsahariana como estudio de caso

This article discusses various aspects related to the production of Spanish documentaries over the last decade in the specific field of sub-Saharan immigration, to ascertain how it has evolved and what variants are involved. This will allow us to determine who the agents involved in production are, how televisions, institutions and other agencies are engaged, and to what extent such productions are made in a channel of social transformation. We use the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a representative sample of 41 Spanish documentaries made between 2001 and 2011, a period in which Spanish documentaries in general - and documentaries on migration issues in particular - experienced moments of boom and bust. This article shows that as a whole Catalonia is the community that has produced the largest number of documentaries about sub-Saharan immigration, and argues that in Spain the production of these documentaries has been very dependent on economic fluctuations, government policies on immigration, the "crisis of the dinghies" and the dynamics of the media. Finally, we propose booming trends in the search for new forms of financing.