Xavier Artigas

Xavier Artigas was born in Barcelona and also lived in France, Germany, and the United States. He graduated with a Sociology degree from the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität Münster and after returning to his hometown in 2007, he obtained a Master's Degree in Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University. After an uneven career as a visual artist, he collaborated with filmmakers such as Mercedes Álvarez and Ricardo Íscar. In 2009 he founded his own independent production company: Metromuster and that same year he directed his first film, “NO-RES”, an observational documentary about urban space and gentrification in Barcelona. The film was awarded Best Spanish Documentary at DocumentaMadrid 2011. This project established three pillars for his future activity as a filmmaker: community, free culture, and political cinema. In 2011, he joined the 15M audiovisual commission and began to collectively explore new audiovisual formats linked to political activism. The documentary Ciutat Morta is one of the most famous outcomes of this experience, mixing journalistic rigor and poetry, which managed to provoke an unprecedented media stir. Ciutat traveled all over the world and was awarded at numerous film festivals, including the Malaga Film Festival (Biznaga de Plata – best documentary film). In 2016, he co-directed Tarajal, a documentary about institutional racism in Spain, which managed to reopen the legal case against a group of civil guards who allegedly murdered dozens of African immigrants in Melilla in 2014. In 2018, after four years of research, he wrote--in collaboration with the screenwriter Laia Manresa--and co-directed Idrissa, Chronicle of an Ordinary Death, which premiered at the Seville Film Festival (Official Section). Conceived as a project of social transformation, the occasional documentary, in a meta-cinematic exercise, repatriates to Africa the body of Idrissa Diallo, a young African who died at the CIE in Barcelona. In addition to his work as a documentary filmmaker, Artigas has extensive experience as a scriptwriter and director of fiction spots for NGOs and social movements. Since 2020 he has collaborated as an instructor and content creator in the Communication Degree at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). It is in this context that he has published essays related to transmedia narratives and transformational documentary cinema.