Demonstration

On March 29, 2012, Spain experienced mass strikes against the government’s far-reaching austerity plans. In the center of Barcelona, protests got out of hand and a small army of police armed with rubber bullets was needed to subdue the crowd. People congregated everywhere, fires were started and shops and offices closed down. Remarkably, the doors of the Opera House, where that day Léon Minkus’s Don Quixote was on the program, remained open. On this day, 32 film students from the Master of Creative Documentary course at the Pompeu Fabra University also took to the streets, with their cameras and Russian documentary maker Victor Kossakovsky, to make a film documenting the events of that day. The end result is a "film ballet," consisting primarily of footage of the streets and squares shot from various perspectives. The images filmed on the streets are accompanied by Minkus’s music, mostly without ambient sound, which makes for an alienating effect. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)