Javier Cercas and the imposter

Enric Marco emerged as a spokesman for the former Spanish deportees in the Nazi camps by inventing a past as a prisoner and creating a pedigree as an anti-Franco militant. His imposture was discovered by a historian on the eve of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps on 8 May 2005. Enric Marco joins the list of impostors who claim to have experienced deportation, which they never did, such as Benjamin Wilkomirski, Micha Defonseca and others. Even so, in Spain, his fraud takes on a particular dimension, going from being a simple fact to becoming an important social issue, shaking a country where the memory of the Second World War is largely forgotten.

Despite his resistance and disgust towards the character himself, the writer Javier Cercas finally plunges into this story with three questions tormenting him: ‘Why did Marco lie about one of the most atrocious crimes of humanity? Why was he believed? Why does his case disturb him so much?

For nine years, Cercas investigates the man, conducts interviews with all the protagonists of the case, collects documents in a tireless search for the truth. An unexpectedly rich material to which we have unprecedented access, in which director Catherine Bernstein immerses the viewer – ten years after the publication of the novel and two years after Enric Marco’s death – in the writer’s creative process, both passionate and exhausting, and the questions it raises for us as individuals as well as for society.