Unit 7

Seville, 1987. The city is preparing for the 1992 exposition and the central districts are to be cleared. A four-man drug squad is assigned to it. Their methods are plain: beatings, planted evidence, threats. Over five years the unit changes both the city and itself; the young officer who was hesitant at the start becomes the hardest of them. The subject is not drugs but violence used as an instrument of urban redevelopment. The squad is not fighting crime; it is reducing visibility. The film says so outright and shows what their superiors knew. The form stretches across time. Over five years the haircuts, the cars, the music and the city change; as the exposition site rises the neighbourhoods empty. That parallel is the spine of the narrative. It was awarded in acting categories at the Spanish Goyas. Alberto Rodríguez returned to the same region and period in later films, and this is an early example of that line. Antonio de la Torre plays the experienced officer and Mario Casas the young one. Who it is for: viewers interested in Spanish crime films and the Spain of the eighties. Who it is not for: anyone uncomfortable with police violence at the centre; the film neither excuses nor condemns it.