A police pamphlet

At first glance,Icarus: The Week in FlamesIt is a police whitewashing pamphlet that seems intended to be shown in schools and classrooms, to see if it awakens vocations and serves to recruit young people for the riot police of the National Police."I relearned why I lift this uniform""An excited agent says at the end. Perhaps she is the same agent who signs the Spanish flag with which the documentary begins and ends, with phrases like..."I too defended the unity of Spain.". But Icarus It's more than a pamphlet, of course.

The piece has documentary value due to the previously unseen images and sound, but it doesn't quite reach the level of a documentary. The context of the 2017 police violence against peaceful voters is missing, and there are no testimonies from the protesters. If someone didn't know what it was about, they would see the story of a group of hapless police officers abandoned by their superiors and the political class, harassed and assaulted, as if they were a group ofmarineWithout supplies or a compass, lost on Iwo Jima and surrounded by Japanese on all sides, ignorant of what awaited them, facing a violent and celebratory mob which, in the end, they defeat without anyone knowing or understanding why. "Either chaos or peace," one of them said. Peace wins. The cinema erupts in applause and the spectators wipe away a tear. As if the unity of Spain had truly hung by a thread thanks to some hardworking and patient riot police. As if the State didn't have a king, an army, spies, judges, prisons, patriotic police, embassies, and sewers.

It is a patriotic tale with political value, destined to win the battle of narrative and history, so that it says that, in the Process, the violence was perpetrated by the Catalans and not the Spanish police. An officer concludes, quite rightly: "Society will not forget it."