Granada filmmaker Lucía Selva releases documentary film on urban identity

Granadian filmmaker Lucía Selva has released her first feature film, ‘Quién vio los templos caer’, a work blending essay, documentary, and fiction. The film explores themes of urban transformation, gentrification, and the loss of spatial identity.

The narrative centers on the historical figure Mariano Fernández Santiago, known as ‘Chorrojumo’. A former blacksmith and sheep shearer from Sacromonte, he became a folkloric character and one of Granada’s first tourist guides in the late 19th century by sharing stories of the Alhambra.

In the film, Chorrojumo wanders through modern Granada alongside Anas, a young Moroccan man searching for the ancestral home of his Moorish forebears. A solar eclipse serves as a central metaphor and a premonitory sign of a changing world, reflecting the director’s intent to capture the city’s evolving memory and territory.