Quinqui (film genre)
Cine quinqui or cine kinki is a Spanish exploitation film genre that was most popular at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s.
Features
The films were centered around underclass delinquents, drugs, and love, and usually starred non-professional actors picked off the street. The most representative directors of the genre are and Eloy de la Iglesia, even if other directors such as Carlos Saura, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón and Vicente Aranda also reproduced the quinqui social imaginaries in some of their films.Quinqui films focused on marginalized working-class adolescents in the outskirts of Spanish cities involved in small-scale robbery and street crime. They showed raw violence, explicit sex, police brutality, and commonly depicted heroin use.
The genre draws inspiration from Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. Several of the stars of quinqui cinema would go on to die prematurely, most due to heroin use but some of AIDS. Some of them include,,,, and Sonia Martínez.
In terms of its political-ideological leanings, José Luis López Sangüesa distinguishes three types of quinqui films: those representative of a Catholic paternalism, those representative of a Left disenchanted with the Transition, and a quinqui strand that could be discursively categorized as extreme right-wing or sociological Francoism.