Biography
Anna Giralt Gris was born in Barcelona in 1978. From 1998 to 2002 she studied at the Ramon Llull Private University in Barcelona in the field of film and communication, specialising in journalism and documentary film. After graduating, she began working in television and film. Among other things, she worked as a researcher, field producer and editor on numerous TV documentaries and reports. She made her own short documentaries with "One Day Around Iran" (ES 2002), "A Human Shields Diary" (ES 2003) and "A Different Life" (ES 2005), the portrait of a schizophrenic man. Parallel to these activities, she studied temporarily Arabic language and literature (2004-2005) and political science (2007-2008), both also in Barcelona.
In 2009 she made the documentary "Raval's Anatomy" (TV) about Barcelona's El Raval neighbourhood, and in 2010 the documentary series "Barcelona Any Zero" ("Barcelona Year One"), about newly arrived residents of the city. Gris' medium-length documentary "Europe Trap" (ES 2013), about a 55-year-old Afghan woman trying to get to her son, who is stuck as a refugee in Greece, screened at numerous international festivals. Her short documentary "44 messages from Catalonia" (US 2018), about the Catalan independence referendum in 2017, was produced by Laura Poitras. In 2017, she began working at the production company GusanoFilms, based in Bogota (Colombia) and Barcelona.
In 2020, Gris began work on her first feature-length documentary, "Robin Bank", about the action of Enric Duran, a Spaniard who applied for loans from dozens of banks in 2008 but never paid them back. However, he did not want to enrich himself, but forwarded the money to social projects. Thus, he became known as the "Spanish Robin Hood". At the Festival DocsBarcelona 2022, the film won the audience award. The German cinema release followed in November 2022.
In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Anna Giralt Gris teaches at several Spanish universities and realises interactive media projects; she is a member of the ARTIFICIO collective, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence on art.