Women, gender roles and prize policies in Spanish cinema (1940-1959)

We will try to establish in this essay some of the assigned women roles in the films awarded by the Franco administration. We will do so using a sociological approach as well as film analysis. Awards, grants and credits were part of a cultural production system that supported singular discourses. While censorship has received an important attention in Spanish film studies it is our opinion that these incentives had been somewhat overlooked. Scripts, characters and subjects where directly affected by them. We will try to show, therefore, the efficacy and persistence of the models established during the first years of dictatorship and that we can track in some cases even nowadays