You may remember that Cien libros juntas, Marga Melià's last film, was one of the five most-watched titles at CineCiutat in 2025. We're expecting no less this year. So — that, and how much we love her work — we've built a whole season around her big new release: Suportant el paradís (Enduring Paradise).
The season is called Suportant el paradís: conversations on the future of Mallorca.
Let's start with the film, which has a lovely story behind how it got here. Between 2009 and 2010, Marga Melià — then a culture journalist — sat down opposite twenty Mallorcan artists with a camera and one deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be from here. Those conversations became a book, Soportando el paraíso (Lunwerg, 2011). And many hours of tape stayed inside a box.
Fifteen years on, those tapes no longer say the same thing. What sounded back then like artistic unease reads today like a report. They were talking about tourism, about prices, about the people leaving, about an island that was starting to become unliveable for the people who lived on it. And they were saying it before the word "touristification" entered public debate, before the holiday flats in every doorway, before the demonstrations. There's an enormous difference between watching a film that explains the present to you and watching one that proves the present was already visible fifteen years ago and we didn't listen.
Miquel Barceló is in it, and Carme Riera, Agustí Villaronga and Susy Gómez. And there are brief appearances from artists Marga has interviewed this very year: Júlia Colom, Xanguito, Laura Gost, Joan Aguiló, Jaume Carrió, Clara Ingold. Fifteen years of distance inside the same film. And there's another layer here: some of those voices are no longer around to see how it all turned out. The film has become, without meaning to, an archive.
A note on the filmography: this is the first project Marga ever shot as a director, and it's the last one she's releasing. She started here, went off to make Bittersweet Days (2017), the first feature directed by a woman in the Balearic Islands, then the short Dona, then Cien libros juntas — and now she comes back to the beginning. Suportant el paradís premiered at the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, in the Talent Balear strand, and arrives at CineCiutat on 4 September.
And now the season, which is the part we're most excited about.
Because a film like this shouldn't end when the lights come up. Every Tuesday in September, after the screening, there'll be a 40-minute conversation with people who have spent years thinking and working on exactly this: Obra Cultural Balear, GOB, Menys Turisme Més Vida, SOS Residents, Terraferida, Margalida Ramis, Xavier Pastor, and others.
Four Tuesdays. A film that has been waiting fifteen years. And the conversation that comes afterwards, which is the one that really concerns us.
Programme
Tuesday 8 September — Ecology, limited resources and sustainability
- Jaume Adrover — spokesperson, Terraferida
- Aina Llauger — board member, GOB Mallorca
- Iván Murray — PhD in geography and expert in environmental sustainability
Tickets here.
Tuesday 15 September — Art and culture as tools for reflection and change
- Magdalena Aguiló — president of the Balearic Islands Association of Art Critics and Curators
- Jaume Reus — PhD in art history and cultural manager
- Nadal Suau — essayist, literary critic and lecturer
Tickets here.
Tuesday 22 September — Housing, gentrification and the loss of identity
- Carles Bover — filmmaker specialising in social documentary
- Pepa Aguiló — spokesperson, SOS Residents
- Pere Joan — representative of Menys Turisme, Més Vida
Tickets here.
Tuesday 29 September — A history of social movements in Mallorca
- Margalida Ramis — ecofeminist activist, columnist and former GOB spokesperson
- Xavier Pastor — biologist, oceanographer and former president of Greenpeace Spain and of GOB
- Antoni Llabrés — president of Obra Cultural Balear
Tickets here.
All conversations are moderated by Marga Melià, filmmaker and author of Suportant el paradís.