Out of Frame: Filming the Anthropocene and other “-cenes” in Alcarràs (Carla Simón)and As bestas (Rodrigo Sorogoyen)

This article analyzes two acclaimed Spanish films, Alcarràs and As bestas, which illuminate local resistance to large-scale renewable energy projects. These films highlight a rift between local and national perspectives, underscoring a key theme in environmental humanities: the challenge of reconciling the differing spatial and temporal scales of ecological crises. This issue of scale also reveals a deeper conceptual gap—the difficulty of grasping the vast dimensions of the ecological crisis, or the extent of changes needed to address it, within the context of daily life and entrenched political and social structures. In the films, both top-down solutions and certain forms of local opposition are seen to be problematic, tied to patriarchy and other structures of exploitation. My analysis also explores a central concern in ecocriticism and ecomedia studies: how to depict the Anthropocene. I argue that through allegory and offscreen presences, the films convey the multiplicity of the Anthropocene’s, in line with conceptual frameworks like the Capitalocene and the Wasteocene. Their localized narratives and settings allegorically connected to global crises, reflecting an Anthropocene composed of contrasting human-shaped material and conceptual ‘bubbles.’