OUR FATHER, OUR PRESIDENT

Synopsis

OUR FATHER, OUR PRESIDENT is an in-depth look at the complex politician Jordi Pujol, one of the most relevant and contradictory figures on the political-media stage in contemporary Catalonia and Spain.

The film is set around the time in which Pujol’s contradictions really came to the fore. In 2014, he confessed to a hidden family fortune in Andorra, a well-known tax haven, which led to a legal case that would see his whole family in the dock. A case that was closely linked to corruption scandals in the Catalan government and in Pujol’s own party.

Flashbacks throughout the film give the viewer the chance to see some of the other sides of Jordi Pujol’s character: the young Catholic who decided to dedicate his life to the recuperation of the Catalonia whose aspirations had been so severely repressed under Franco. It was this young man with whom Marta Ferrusola fell in love and went on to spend the rest of her life with; the man of ambition, who created purely Catalan institutions and centres of power, such as the Banca Catalana; the leaderpatriarch who looked the other way when his sons abused their positions; and the President and symbol of an era, who proclaimed himself a martyr when the Banca Catalana’s dirty laundry was made public…

The weeks following the explosion of the scandal would be an ordeal for Pujol, whose strong religious beliefs saw him consumed by guilt. His regrets at being an absent father became mixed with dejection on seeing that his legacy -which was, above all, an ethical one- had been irrevocably damaged. Pujol had spent his whole career promoting his personal identification with Catalonia and so, when the scandal broke within the framework of the conflictive, Catalan independence process, it really was the fall of an icon for the Catalan people.

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