Ada Colau is an activist of the movement for affordable rents in Barcelona. When the fragmented left of the city needs to be united to enter practical municipal politics and, ideally, supply the next head of the city, she qualifies as front-runner for the collective platform “Barcelona en Comú”.
Over a period of nine months, director Pau Faus observes a process that could be called a “basic democracy workshop”. Faus claims that it’s neither intentional nor coincidental that his film has also, to a large extent, become a participant observation of the top candidate’s life, but inevitable. He confidently avoids raising any suspicion that this is the finished, valid and undoubted image of a politician. Instead he reflects on how these images are produced while the engine is running. At the end of the film Ada Colau will have become a different person AND remained the same – an impossible feat she is forced to pull off by her character and the political ethics she feels bound to. The motto that Ada Colau had inscribed on the door of the council chamber as a universal reminder after she became mayor in May 2015 was: “Let us never forget who we are or why we are here.”
Ralph Eue
