Notes for a Heist Film

A director wants to make a heist film and gets in touch with a real robber to do it: the man known as the Robin Hood of Vallecas, Flako, who is serving his sentence. The film becomes the record of a friendship built between two men around a shared aim, with the crime itself doing the storytelling. Flako was the most wanted bank robber of Spain’s crisis years, a butronero who went in through the wall, following his father’s trade, who carried out a run of robberies in Madrid until his arrest in 2013. León Siminiani builds the documentary as two stories facing each other in a mirror: the robbery, and the making of the film about the robbery. It premiered at the 2018 San Sebastián Film Festival, opened in Spain on 5 December 2018, was nominated for best documentary at the Goyas and won best documentary at the Feroz awards.