Xavi – The Director
I am in Barcelona, it’s summer, there is an outdoor pool outside my hotel window, and it is crowded. I am not here for holidays, DocsBarcelona has started with some events for professionals and tomorrow is the opening of the festival for the audience – opening film “Falciani’s Tax Bomb”, a German/Spanish coproduction with an English director Ben Lewis. But in my mind I have been in Barcelona for some days. Saturday at Camp Nou the ceremony was held to celebrate that FCBarcelona won the Spanish League in football AND it was the farewell to Xavi Hernandez, who has been in the club sinde he was 11 years old and has played (from 1998-2015) more than 500 matches. 35 years old he has decided to end his carreer in Qatar, where other ex-Barca players spend their life and earn…including Michael Laudrup as a coach.
Anyway, I was thinking about how squeeze in a text about this wonderful gentleman of the game, a man I have adored for the whole time – and is he not the perfect dramaturg? Has he not been the one who has mastered to find the rythm, the one who has been able to see when the descriptive, the informative should be there, playing the ball around in small circles for suddenly to feel that now is the time to poetry, to surprise the audience making a peak in the narrative and send a player a pass that makes it easy for him to score. A director, an editing director who knows when to set more pace. Always available with an enormous overview, a man with a big generosity to his audience.
Photo taken by friend and colleague Joan Gonzalez, who was there with his son Marti.
