Film Screening: The Platform

The People’s Forum will host an in-person screening of the 2019 Spanish dystopian thriller The Platform (El hoyo), directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, on Thursday, October 29, 2026, in Manhattan. The ninety-four-minute film serves as a visceral allegory for systemic inequality and class hierarchy.

Set within a towering vertical prison facility known as the Hole, the narrative follows Goreng, a resident who awakens on level forty-eight alongside an older cellmate. Each day, an opulent banquet platform laden with food descends through a central rectangular shaft, stopping for two minutes per floor. Inmates on higher tiers gorge themselves on an abundance of luxury dishes, leaving only picked-over remnants for the floors directly below and nothing at all for prisoners trapped in the lower depths. As inmates are randomly reassigned to different vertical levels each month, the facility pits individuals against one another in a desperate contest between personal self-preservation and the radical solidarity required to survive collective starvation.

According to the organizers, the screening uses Gaztelu-Urrutia’s stark allegory to examine how entrenched institutional hierarchies reward unrestrained consumption at the top while imposing deprivation on those below. The organizers frame the film’s narrative as an exploration of the urgent choices confronting societies structured around artificial scarcity: whether to accept the brutal logic of individual survival within an exploitative system, or to build collective solidarity across divisions to dismantle it.

The screening runs from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Paul and Eslanda Robeson Cinema at The People’s Forum, located at 320 West 37th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Admission is offered as a free political education program, though organizers request that attendees reserve an eight-dollar solidarity ticket online to ensure room capacity limits are maintained and to fund ongoing community educational programming. To register for the screening or learn more about upcoming events, visit The People’s Forum.