Director of an award-winning documentary

A documentary directed by Yrsa Roca Fannberg, The Ground Beneath Our Feet, has been met with critical acclaim and even won an award. Yrsa Roca teaches the courses Communication channels I and Creative documentary as part of UI’s programmes in applied studies in culture and communication.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet received a special mention at the Zurich Film Festival in Switzerland and had previously won an award at the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, one of the most prestigious documentary festivals in Asia. Yrsa credits this success to the film’s power to touch many people, especially those who have supported loved ones through the sunset of their lives. “The film contains beauty, sorrow and humour,” says Yrsa, “so it plays on many different emotions, including emotions that are difficult to put into words. Still, I didn’t expect quite such a warm reception. Nor did I expect that the film would reach such a broad audience. I was surprised to see how deeply it has connected with young people,” she says.

Yrsa studied documentary making in Barcelona, building on her background in the visual arts. She made the decision to follow this path after watching the films of the Armenian director Harutyn Khachatryan. “So I applied to Pompeu Fabra University to study creative documentary, which is where I really developed this passion. It was an excellent university, brilliant lecturers. And I also met people who have now become close colleagues, like the editor Federico Delpero Bejar who was in the year below me. After graduating, I decided to shoot my first film, Salóme (2014), and after that there was no turning back.” Yrsa went on to direct The Last Autumn (2019) and The Ground Beneath Our Feet (2025).

Yrsa’s courses at UI explore the history of documentary making, as well as the practical skills required to create a documentary film: “In the autumn semester, my students make short documentaries in groups, which serves as a kind of introduction to the course in the spring semester, in which they make documentaries to be screened in Bíó Paradís. We have two goals: firstly, to finish making a film with everything that entails, and secondly, to develop insight into documentary making as an art form.”  

Now that the subject of AI is dominating public discourse, we can’t resist asking Yrsa what impact it will have on the world of documentary making. She believes that the technology is still too new to fully develop an informed opinion: “There will be a role for AI of some kind, but I hope it will be the human creativity and beauty of the form that stands out.”

The Ground Beneath Our Feet is showing in Bíó Paradís.  

UI offers applied studies in culture and communication as a 90 ECTS MA programme or a 30 ECTS microcredential.

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, director and instructor in applied studies in culture and communication at UI.