Queering Post-War Childhood: Pa Negre

The ideologically opposed camps of the ‘two Spains’ have given rise to two corresponding ‘cines con niño’. From the nal years of Franco’s dictatorship, and in greater numbers since the 1990s, lms forming a nuevo cine con niño have appeared. Agustí Villaronga’s Pa negre (2010) shares commonalities with earlier features, but is unique in its queering of the childhood represented in the cines con niño. The gure of the ghostly gay child, per Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept, is key to understanding how the rst Catalan-language feature to win a Best Film Goya is the exception that proves the representational rules of the nuevo cine con niño’s retrospection on post-war childhood. The current study explores Villaronga’s queering of the main character in relation to a wider spectrum of difference during Franco’s dictatorship and in distinction from its nuevo cine con niño peers present in the lm as Derridean ‘phantom’ intertexts. Villaronga’s adaptation of Emili Teixidor’s works, Pa negre (2003) and Retrat d’un assassí d’ocells (1988), highlights the related theme of difference indicated in the inclusions and exclusions in Teixidor’s language and explores insiders, outsiders, and abjection through character development and the composition of its mise-en-scene.