Ciutat morta

On the night of 4 February 2006 a police officer was left paralysed by a falling object during an intervention at a party in Barcelona, nine people were arrested, and the trial that followed produced convictions. Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega reopen that file, known in the city simply as the 4F case, on the argument that the people punished for it had nothing to do with the injury. The thread running through the film belongs to Patricia Heras, a poet detained at a hospital that night, imprisoned, and dead by her own hand in 2011 during her first leave. That two of the officers at the centre of the case were later convicted of torture is its hardest piece of evidence. When Catalan television broadcast it, the argument widened from police violence to what the city sells of itself.