In the mid-20th century, migration to industrial and tourist cities intensified, and from the 21st century onwards, to a much lesser extent, there has been a movement of repopulation and return by neo-rural dwellers with no previous links to these territories. The text proposes the use of cinema as a tool for geographical and discursive analysis to try to interpret a complex reality and understand the internal and contextual keys that allow us to comprehend the phenomenon of ‘emptied Spain’ in a new way, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques from the fields of geography and communication. Thus, through a comparative analysis of the films La ciudad no es para mí (Pedro Lazaga, 1966), La piel quemada (Josep Maria Forn, 1967), Las ovejas no pierden el tren (Álvaro Fernández Armero, 2014) and Suro (Mikel Gurrea, 2022), it is possible to establish an approximation of the diachronic evolution of fictional representations of rural-urban migration, depopulation and the more recent process of repopulation, focusing on two different moments: the late Franco period and the present day. In this sense, cinema has contributed to creating, consolidating or modifying images and imaginaries, not without stereotypes, about realities that, through the filter of fiction, acquire an epistemological and interpretative value that is very useful for studying and attempting to understand time (chronological dimension), places (spatial dimension) and circumstances (plot, axiological, socio-economic and cultural dimensions) in which it was filmed and distributed. The analysis of these four feature films, which span the genres of comedy and social drama associated with neorealism and neoruralism, uses cultural studies to bear witness to social changes and historical narratives against the backdrop of migration from a pendular perspective (villages-city and city-villages).