Practicing Time: the case of En los márgenes
Short Note
Christian Bröer, University of Amsterdam, Department of Sociology, c.broer@uva.nl
26 8 2026
The 2022 movie En los márgenes, by Juan Diego Botto, opens unassumingly: an alarm-clock rings at 8 in the morning in a small sunny apartment in Madrid. This signals the start of a compelling social drama, unfolding over 24 hours. The film follows three protagonists whose lives shape up struggling with economic hardship, bureaucratic indifference and loss. Azucena, a mother, fights desperately to prevent her family's eviction, seeking legal aid and mobilising community support. Rafa, a dedicated lawyer and activist, attempts to balance his work assisting vulnerable citizens with the demands of his family life. Meanwhile, Teodora, an elderly woman facing displacement, navigates loneliness and despair as she prepares for an uncertain future. We can interpret their intersecting stories as another example of the profound emotional toll of financial precarity, exposing systemic injustices while highlighting the power of solidarity and resistance. And indeed, through intimate storytelling and urgent performances, En los márgenes offers a critique of contemporary socio-economic struggles, shedding light on the human cost of austerity and the resilience of those fighting to stay afloat. Yet, there is different and more original layer. Although the clock is ticking, Azucena, Teodora and Rafa deal differently with institutional rhythms. Comparing characters, it turns out that time is less obvious and exacting. Rather than merely a clockwork, time actually arises at the intersections of powerful institutional rhythms and personal life-histories.
We base our reading of En los márgenes on a novel conceptualization of time as a social practice. While time has been a key dimension in many practice-based approaches, this essay uniquely focuses on practices explicitly concerned with time itself as these are constructed in the movie. We now look at the main characters to see how this unfolds in their stories.
Azucena
Azucena is at the verge of being evicted for rental debts 24 hours after the start of the movie. Together with a support group, she tries to avert the deadline by exerting moral pressure on bank employees. While hurrying to avert the eviction, Azucena also finds emotional support, relaxation and a space to connect in the support groups home base. In parallel she struggles and quarrels with her boyfriend about taking responsibility for housing. He is not convinced that mobilization is useful. Azucena strongly focusses on the moment or at least the remaining hours and through this attempts to resists the looming disaster. She has hardly any resources than her presence, her voice and horizontal connections. Her struggle is in vain when it comes to the eviction, yet she has found new allies and at least partly transformed her future.
Rafa
Rafa is trying to help several citizens threatened by governmental action. He is constantly running, chasing papers and pressuring lower level government clerks to do him a favour. Rafa is a lawyer and uses his social standing together with his towering physique to avert deadlines. He is so focussed that he once more fails his wife and son, trying to repair this by taking his son on his own path of struggle. Similar to Azucena, Rafa is intensely focussed on the moment. Yet, given his larger pool of social capital, he can improvise and adapt also timewise: slow down or speed up and synchronize activities if need be. Rafa is partly successful in aiding marginalized citizens and partly not. For Rafa, different from Azucena, this day of struggle is also just one of many episodes. In fact, chasing time to keep ahead of institutions is what his life seems all about.
Teodora
Teodora is alone at home, fruitlessly trying to get her son on the phone. We follow her doing groceries, looking at her late husband’s photo and preparing the table for a dinner for two. Time seems to move painfully slow at present and Teodora’s thoughts and actions appear oriented towards the past. Only at the end of the story we learn that Teodora, too, was facing eviction at the same moment as Azucena. But Teodora didn’t fight it nor did she wait for it. She prepared a last good meal and ended her life before the deadline.
So, the harsh bureaucratic and economic timelines set the stage for three different temporal practices: resisting institutional time through social action and building alternative futures, outpacing institutional time or succumbing to the lack of temporal and social support. While the case of Teodora shows how eviction and loneliness can constrict the future and make time unlivable, there is also sense of escaping time in a cruel way. In less sad ways, Rafa and Azucena are also arriving at ways of doing time which can neither be explained by oppressive systems nor by free will.
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