6 Días en Barcelona
Neus Ballús, Spain, 2021o
To get through his one-week probationary contract, a young Moroccan plumber must deal with equally eccentric colleagues and customers. Valero, his superior, doubts Moha has what it takes, or that customers will accept a Moroccan worker. Maybe six days is not enough time for someone to overcome their prejudices. But it might be enough to discover that we must live together.
It would be easy for director Neus Ballús to make a feel-good buddy movie out of the unequal protagonist couple in her film, at the end of which the two are in each other's arms. But she doesn't make it that easy for herself or for us. Rather, the 43-year-old Catalan, who was already nominated for the European Film Award in 2013 with her first film The Plague, draws multi-layered characters, whom she meets with soothing sobriety. Even the most bizarre clients, in whose flats the plumbers end up, seem firmly rooted in reality. The backbone is provided by realistic dialogue whose light-hearted honesty not only makes for laughs. The voiceover, which covers up its didactic function with convulsive poetry, is easy to ignore because of such qualities.
Léon HüslerGalleryo
