Its broadcast became a historic event: on January 17, 2015, nearly 569,000 viewers (a 20% share) followed the story of the 4F case, an exorbitant figure for Channel 33. The documentary had toured festivals and community centers, and now it reached the public on a much larger scale.
The anticipation was no coincidence. Days earlier, a court in Barcelona ordered five minutes of the feature film to be cut, claiming it violated the right to honor of a former police chief. The judicial censorship triggered an unexpected Streisand effect, and social media erupted with the hashtags #TotCiutatMorta and #BaixaalBar, as thousands of people organized unofficial screenings of the full footage.
The events recounted in the documentary, directed by Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega, are devastating. It all began on February 4, 2006 (which later gave the case its name: 4F), during the eviction of a party at a squatted theater. Police charged, protesters threw objects in response, and a local police officer became tetraplegic after being struck by a flowerpot while not wearing a helmet. Faced with difficulty in finding the perpetrator, the police randomly arrested several people found nearby, based on racial profiling or their appearance. These individuals would be deprived of their liberty for two years, awaiting a trial in which police testimony was the sole basis for convictions carrying heavy prison sentences.
Furthermore, several of those arrested reported torture during interrogations: threats, simulated drowning, and assaults requiring stitches, as well as cigarette burns. Among them was Patricia Heras, a young literature student who was arrested at a hospital where she had gone for an accident unrelated to the riots.
Five years later, in 2011, partly as a consequence of having been the victim of a police setup and repression, Patricia Heras took her own life during a furlough exit.
The film’s journalistic investigation proved that, over time, the officers whose testimony had been key were convicted of torturing another detainee in a different case. Additionally, a person later emerged who claimed to have information about who had actually thrown the flowerpot. Despite all this, the public prosecutor’s office refused to reopen the 4F case.
The documentary stands as a reminder that the judicial system is a guarantor of justice, and to prove the existence of a police setup with political and media cover.