The People on the Steps

This is a first-person account from some of the people who defended the Pau Claris high school in Barcelona on 1 October 2017. It is a documentary that puts faces to some of the protagonists of a video that went viral in a very short time: that of an officer of the Spanish National Police force jumping down a flight of stairs and kicking a citizen. The police operation to suppress the referendum in Catalonia on 1 October 2017 was one of the most controversial and contentious issues to happen in Spain in the last years. On one hand you had complaints of police brutality from the participants in the referendum, on the other, the narrative the Spanish state wanted to impose, saying that the actions of the police had been appropriate and even that the images were faked. The value of this documentary is simply to take the example of one polling station, a place from where the images of a policeman kicking a voter were broadcast around the world, and listen to the first-hand accounts of those who were there. It is a story which, due to the polarisation of the press and television in Spain, has not had a chance to be viewed all around the world.