Singing on the Roofs
Address: enric rib
interpreters: Gilda Love, Chloe Romero
Year: 2022
premiere: Friday, 1 July 2022
★★★
Singing on the Roofs blends documentary insight with a texture of fiction that could feel real enough to touch. It grows from the long-standing collaboration between director Enric Ribes and the transformative artist Gilda Love, a partnership that began with a micro-track of the same name in 2017. The film closes with a nod to Federico García Lorca and lines from The Ladybug’s Song, threading memory and music into the fabric of the story.
Love stands as a figure linked to Barcelona’s Chinatown, a cityscape that holds an irreplaceable, evolving history. The film becomes a chronicle of a way of life that once thrived there, a community now marked by loss and shift. The core of the film is a crafted narrative about a family that the director imagines having, framed by the presence of a young woman and her daughter. Through their imagined household, the film explores longing, resilience, and the gaps between past and present.
From there the storytelling moves through several textures. It alternates between melodrama and the intimate census of a neighborhood, between archival footage and vivid scenes from performances at the famous Bodega Bohemia, and the idealization of a life that feels almost unattainable. What makes this work stand out is the director’s ability to present the old Raval school atmosphere in a way that invites both the participants and the audience to speak freely in front of the camera. The camera captures a real, unguarded moment, even as it follows an invented family dynamic. The result is an image of reality that is clear, bright, and personal, never merely documentary or fictional, but something in between that resonates with lived experience.
Throughout the film, the audience encounters a portrait that is both intimate and expansive. The performances and daily scenes are woven together to reveal how a neighborhood lives through memory and change, how stories are preserved through repetition and reinvention. The tension between what is seen on screen and what remains just beyond reach gives the work its emotional pull. By blending real locations, archival fragments, and a constructed domestic sphere, the film invites viewers to consider how culture persists even as neighborhoods transform, and how art can illuminate those transformations with honesty and warmth. The result is a reflective, empathetic meditation on community, memory, and the power of storytelling to keep a place alive in the imagination.