‘We have lived beyond our means.’ This expression – viver acima das nossas possibilidades in Portuguese, vivir por encima de nuestras posibilidades in Spanish – was endlessly repeated between 2011 and 2012 in the Iberian Peninsula. Aníbal Cavaco Silva, former president of the Portuguese Republic, used it in May 2011, after the signing of a €78 billion bailout programme between the Portuguese government and the Troika formed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Later on, Fátima Báñez, former Spanish Minister of Employment and Social Security, did the same in the parliamentary debate on state budget held in May 2012, five months after the overwhelming victory of the People's Party in the 2011 Spanish general election. The sentence soon became a mantra for conservative governments, since it allowed them to justify the adoption of austerity measures without having to assume any political responsibility after years of systematic indebtedness, institutional corruption and public overspending, as Rafael Rodríguez Tranche criticised at the time (2013). The idea, however, was not new: a few years before, the same narrative had already been used in the United States to moralise a problem – the aftermath of the financial crisis – that actually had institutional roots.

The unexpected outbreak of the Great Recession, and especially its long duration, challenged the self-image of Iberian societies: the set of wishes, fictions and self-representations associated with an inclusive middle class fell apart overnight (Observatorio Metropolitano 2011: 73). At first, film-makers did not react to this conjuncture: the financial crisis and its consequences were barely represented in Portuguese or Spanish films until 2011, with the exception of a few titles that drew attention to the malfunctions of these countries prior to the recession. Nevertheless, while the sentence ‘we have lived beyond our means’ was being turned into an ideologically loaded cliché, some filmmakers decided to depict the plight of a wide range of social collectives, such as precarious workers, unemployed people, sick people, evicted owners and tenants, Iberian emigrants in northern Europe, Latin American and African immigrants in the Iberian Peninsula and a disoriented youth with few aspirations and fewer opportunities.