Theory and practice of care

"Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.”

Carolina del Olmo, where is my tribe?

In Sweden – an extreme case of Western trends within the Protestant tradition –, over 50% of the population live alone. People also die alone, forgotten by everyone, after a lifetime of pursuing the desire for personal independence, adapting to social norms, comforts, and socialisation without physical contact. The dream of an independent life, free from community bonds and patriarchal family ties, has turned out to be a nightmare of loneliness, sadness, and existential emptiness.

We need to overcome the binary oppositions that lead us to choose between two almost equally bad options. We don’t have to go back to the old, strictly patriarchal family, but we shouldn’t have to settle for metropolitan solitude either. The idea is to create and experiment with other ways of living and loving.

"According to anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, female lab rats locked in cages with only their young for company started to behave in a manner very similar to 1950s American housewives, with their obsessions and their neuroses. But when observed in the wild, mothers and their offspring showed a wide range of different behaviours in all kinds of social contexts."

                                                                                                                                                             Carolina del Olmo, Where is My Tribe ?

In the documentary The Swedish Theory of Love , a Swedish social worker investigating the growing number of people who die abandoned, completely isolated, asks: “What does it matter if I have a million in the bank if I am not happy?” But it’s not just about achieving happiness, it’s about the immense somnambulant sadness washing over a decaying civilization, where life unfolds in the midst of the epiphany of a mountain of waste. “ Did you hear that? It is the sound of your world collapsing ,” say the Zapatistas. Individual independence is the catastrophic ideal of a world that is perfectly organised and efficient but cold as ice.

“ At the end of independence there is no happiness. At the end of independence there is the emptiness of life, the insignificance of life, and utter, unimaginable boredom.”

                                                                                                                       Zygmunt Bauman, interviewed in The Swedish Theory of Love

To Exist is to Resist is the testimony of a fight that goes beyond the borders of the country where it takes place: the fight for a home. The film offers a reflection on private property from the perspective of those who have already taken over more than 160 buildings in the country of the Bolivarian Revolution. Throughout the film, we are taken into the heart of the “National Committee for the Homeless” by means of its main protagonists, dreamer-soldiers, “tomadores”, who take abandoned buildings in order to give them back to the people who built their ceilings and walls, and could only look at the locked door from the outside...

The Purple Meridians III

The Purple Meridians III

Over the past two years, a total of 19 filmmakers based in the three countries have met, online and in person, to discuss obstacles they face as women and non-binary people in the audiovisual industry, to exchange ideas and resources, and to create together.

Preparations are underway in Italy , Turkey , Catalonia and the Basque Country for the third edition of The Purple Meridians 2023 , with the Gender Equality sponsorship by Eurimages .

This year, the project will have its public and main event at the Durango Book-Music-Cinema Fair on 7 December . Durango is a city in the Basque Country and has been chosen by the organizers of The Purple Meridians to expand even further – as is the purpose of this project – the connections among women filmmakers in Europe and beyond.

The choice of the Basque Country was therefore a ‘natural’ development as Basque filmmakers followed the first two Purple Meridians albeit ‘from a distance’. The program in the Basque Country will be possible thanks to the collaboration with the Durango Book Fair and Suargi Elkartea.

Two main themes would be the focus of this third event:

the difficulties, responses, proposals for women in the audiovisual industry to conjugate work and care work (maternity, care of children, care of elderly, care of ill partner/family member etc) and for women with disabilities.

These two themes will be discussed in a 2-session conference in Durango to be held on 7 December 2023.

Two filmmakers directly and most affected by this situation will be leading the discussion, Lisa Çalan and Ahu Ozturk . The two filmmakers, both Kurdish, will work with Basque filmmakers (who are exploring these issues in their films and who this year will be presenting a manifesto about ‘care’), as well as with the other filmmakers of The Purple Meridians (from Italy and Catalonia), not only in exposing the problems, but also in proposing answers, keeping in mind that one of the pillars of The Purple Meridians project is creating networks among women filmmakers in different countries.

The speakers will be:

Lisa Çalan, Ahu Öztürk (from Turkey, TPM), internationally acclaimed Basque actress Itziar Ituño (La Casa de Papel), Basque directors Ainhoa Olaso (winner of the Aukera program) and Estibaliz Urresola (awarded in Berlin 2023), Catalan director Lara Vilanova (TPM), Italian director Claudia Tosi (TPM), Argentine scriptwriter based in Belfast Luciana de Mello , Lebanese director Mary Jirmanus Saba , Kurdish director Sevinaz Evdike (Women Filmmakers Collective Kezi), and director Elli (Post Collective - Buriatia, Greece, Syria, Belgium).

The day will be accompanied by the screening at Irudienea (12:30h-13:30h) of Estibaliz Urresola's short film, Cuerdas , and a Work in Progress by Mary Jirmanus Saba.

At 19:00 h, the filmmakers will present to the press a summary of the conference's work.

The press conference will feature also an intervention by a Palestinian filmmaker.

The Purple Meridians II

Conversation with Lisa Çalan

Screening at Truffaut Cinema

The Purple Meridians II

Three organisations in cities and countries that are far away from each other, but share the desire for a fairer distribution of opportunities for women and non-binary people in the audiovisual and film industry.

Over the past year, three workshops were held in which 18 film and video makers discussed and shared their experiences and knowledge.

The workshops gave rise to several proposals, including the desire to continue to cultivate these connections, and to organise a face-to-face meeting in which to further develop individual needs and strengthen personal and professional links.

In 2022, we organized a thematic residence at Faberllull Olot to keep working on the proposals that emerged in the 2021 workshops: an international meeting of 10 filmmakers from different countries, to break the boundaries they have faced and contribute proposals for moving forward.

The idea is to create a network for mutual support and exchange for future collaborations, along an axis that crosses the whole of Europe, from its eastern to its western border.

http://purplemeridians.org/

http://purplemeridians.org/

The film focuses on the re-enactment of a demonstration of women against the prohibition of work introduced by the Taliban. The shots were taken during the shooting of the Afghan feature film OSAMA in November 2002 in the streets of Kabul. 1000 women had come to play in this scene, and their personal experiences were identical with the ones of the protagonists. Most of the women acted in the demonstration scene to earn money. By demanding work they hoped to improve their real situation.

The social treatment of poverty is progressively replaced by repression. The poor, sometimes immigrant, being a victim to start with, becomes a potential criminal. The director observes the social violence and the stigmatisation which keep a whole social class in oblivion. He discovers, far remote from EU's democracy, the reality and the functioning of a social apartheid.

Urban space in the city of Barcelona is strongly influenced by the phenomenon of tourism. Four people talk about their impressions through their experience of systematised tourism in the city and the daily life of the people who live in it. “Abandoned City” is a 26 minute documentary that that takes its title from the phrase of one of its characters, who talks about the irony of an overcrowded city affected by abandonment. A local representation of a global phenomenon. This documentary is the result of the group work of the first year of the master of visual anthropology UB-Tanios films.