La maleta d’en Michel is filmmaker Clara Farràs’s personal investigation to find out who owned a suitcase that some friends found in a squatted house in Barcelona. A suitcase containing a treasure: the memories and the memory of the man who owned it. Her fascination with this character, a composer, harpist and variety artist famous in the 1940s, leads Clara to look for documents, music and people who might have known him, in order to reconstruct his life and his professional career, from a bourgeois childhood in Switzerland to his decline as an artist and as a person. This documentary is the story of a life, Michel’s, told through the few keepsakes he kept in a suitcase, and of a search, Clara’s, to put a face, a name and a voice to the memories and hopes shut inside it.
