Riot Police

Made for Movistar+ in 2020, Antidisturbios is Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña's six-part answer to the question of what their cinema looks like at series length. Sorogoyen directed with Borja Soler; the show premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in September 2020 before airing that October, and went on to take Best Drama Series at the Feroz, Ondas, Forqué and Iris awards — close to a clean sweep of the Spanish television year.

It opens with an eviction in central Madrid that goes wrong, staged in long, breathless handheld runs that put the viewer inside the visors rather than across the barricade from them. What follows moves between the six officers involved and Laia Urquijo, the internal-affairs investigator assigned to them, played by Vicky Luengo in the performance that made her a lead. The unit — Hovik Keuchkerian, Raúl Arévalo, Álex García, Roberto Álamo, Raúl Prieto and Patrick Criado — is written without sentiment and without caricature, which is the harder trick.

The series was read in Spain as a genuine intervention: a portrait of policing that neither excuses the men nor reduces them, arriving in a year when the subject was unavoidable everywhere. It remains the highest-rated work of Sorogoyen's career with audiences, and it is the clearest bridge between the institutional cold of The Realm and the rural dread of As Bestas.