Jaume Plensa: Can You Hear Me?

A collection of documentaries on the most outstanding figures of 20th century Spanish culture.

On the occasion of awarding the Cervantes Prize to the Catalan writer Juan Marsé on 23 April 2009, family members, friends and writers offer a sincere portrait of the best chronicler of life in Barcelona, Catalonia, during the post-war period and the worst days of the General Franco dictatorship, in the forties and fifties, and during the economic development and the hard conquest of freedom, in the sixties and seventies.

Ordinary Boys enters into the lives of three young residents of Jaama Mezwak, an impoverished Moroccan neighborhood in the city of Tetouan, home of five of the suicide bombers who blew up the Madrid trains in 2004. Khader is a young man whose family's crushing debts force him to choose between his dream of becoming an actor or abandoning everything to become an illegal alien in Europe. Rabia is an opinionated, ambitious young woman, with strong religious beliefs, struggling to open a clothing store while waiting for the return of her boyfriend. Youssef, a small-time drug dealer coming out of prison, follows any clue he comes upon in search of his brother, who had disappeared without a trace. How will these three young people build their futures? Ordinary Boys is a fly-on-the-wall film that provides a vision from within of what life is truly like in a poor Muslim community.

After learning that his son, Yahya, has died at sea trying to get to Spain, Ahmed Tchiche must find a way to bring his remains back home to Morocco so he and his family can have a proper goodbye. A Spanish mortician, an NGO worker and an established Moroccan immigrant living in Spain all struggle to help Ahmed navigate the complicated process of repatriation.