Cuando las actrices soñaron la democracia

Through a young generation of actresses who imagined new ways of being a woman through indiscipline and the liberation of their bodies, this book invites us to revisit the turbulent period of Spain's democratic transition. The history of Spanish cinema has rarely studied this creative energy, nor the impact these actresses had on society by prefiguring new, active forms of desire and provoking moral and sexual upheavals and ruptures. First, it analyzes how, often trapped in ambivalent plots and exposed to an ambiguous camera or clearly portrayed as victims, these actresses invented fleeting tactics of resistance and shaped a female "star system" inseparable from democratic promises and feminist struggles. It also recognizes in them the desire to experience freedoms more intuited than realized, as well as the radicalism of those figures of dissent (girls, housewives, workers, artists, and street vendors) who emerged as key elements in the new counterculture. The publication culminates with the portrait of ten actresses (Ana Belén, Ángela Molina, Victoria Abril, Carmen Maura, Ana Torrent, Charo López, Amparo Muñoz, Assumpta Serna, Rafaela Aparicio and Verónica Forqué) who forever transformed the representation of women, and not only in Spanish cinema.