This documentary talks about a forest in the middle of Europe, far from the urban world and from civilisation, which is home to a peculiar community of the banished - it is a world for the stranded. A diffuse system that still has total control makes sure that this world doesn't show itself, that it doesn't pop up in our reality and become a disturbance. In Forst the banished proclaim their own truth and tell the story of their empowerment. They gradually recall their identity as political refugees and start to make plans for their escape...

On the border, the line as principle of property and belonging reaches an extreme dimension where it physically defines the sphere of its relations. Those who transgress it reconstruct these imaginary lines on a daily basis, redefining the traditional geography and occupying the non-spaces where others live in a temporary form of existence. These others, the non-citizens, are phantasmtic, exchangeable parts of a flexible market. Made invisible, they are permanently controlled persons. Under the pretext of a greater civilian security, they are kept clear from the public spaces reserved for the citizens with rights and pushed into non-public spaces, which are run by state and military surveillance, multinational operations servicing a European market and non-governmental organisations.

Through many voices, this project articulates the process of living in an area that until recently formed part of the periphery of the city of Barcelona. Torre Baró and Vallbona are two neighbourhoods that are expected to become a node of connection and expansion of metropolitan urban growth. This video tells the short history of these neighbourhoods by focusing on various themes: a first part explains the occupation of the area by settlers and self-builders; a second part characterised by the struggle, the process of socio-political demands and the consolidation of the associative movement; and a final part that outlines its possible future as an enclave of connection and interrelation with the urban context.

“There is a saying in Arabic that translates as ‘I see the stars at noon'. We use it when everything in life is turned upside-down, when things are not as they should be. I first heard it in the tiny Moroccan village of Sebt Jahjouh, travelling with a man named Abdelfattah, a man whose world was upside-down, a man for whom things were definitely not as they should have been.” In January of 2004, in the northern Moroccan city of Tangiers, Abdelfattah is one of many trying to illegally immigrate to Spain by stowing away on a cargo ship. “I See the Stars at Noon” is at times humorous and disturbing, as it intimately examines the circumstances that lead him to risk everything for an utterly uncertain future. The traditional relationship between filmmaker and subject is thrown into question when Abdelfattah asks why his life is being filmed for the benefit of European audiences, and what he deserves in return.

falling and flying / OVNI 2014

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

falling and flying / OVNI 2014

Limbo (Lat. Limbus) ~ the world between the living and the dead ~ the storage space where deleted files are sent ~ a tale by Aldous Huxley.

There is an enormous, constant, and well-organised pressure on social rights and freedoms, backed by a media apparatus that appropriates language and steals our words. Meanwhile, nature is still the source from which we extract the fuel that feeds the engines of progress for the few.

Borders spill beyond boundaries and permeate cities like the laboratory for a new totalitarian society.

Fall & Winter, Cómo robar la vida a un ser humano, Terrorisme d'Auteur, Barcelona the Dead City, Deleuze à Vincennes, Marinaleda, iPhone China, Detroit Wildlife, Barcelona panAfrica, Agustín García Calvo at Sol, Homeland Security.

Thematical screenings

Hall and Auditorium. Simultaneous Screenings

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

Montalegre 5. 08001 Barcelona

Image: Pour Auguste (2010). Chantal Michel

June 2005, the forest of Benyounes in Morocco, 2 km from the fence that separates Ceuta from Morocco. As happens every week, we come across African citizens who are hoping that here they will find an opportunity to cross into Spanish territory, into Europe. Two people from our collective meet with our working group and we talk about many things that worry and affect us. After sharing our stories, we decide to make a documentary that will show the realities that we experience in Morocco as a country of transit.

This documentary explores immigration from two points of view: from the place of origin, and through the eyes of those that stay.

In Benyounes forest, “la foret” as they called their habitants, was the last stage of a long trip for thousands of people coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. Close to the fence that divides Ceuta (Spain) from Morocco, they establish in a variable time, before flank the last obstacle in they way to Europe, looking for a better life. Sometimes running away from wars, politics persecutions, hunger or a precarious economy situation. Lots of times of all of this. In years, the migrants pass across this forest and after some weeks or months they manage to arrive to Ceuta. In finals of 2004, European union start agreements of subcontract Morocco in the control of the Spanish – Moroccan border. The habitants of the forest, started to feel the effects of this agreements: the increase of illegal devolutions, the abuses from the civil police, they install police controls near the forest, they forbid the access to current water, military attacks to the camps in with they made mass arrests and rapes as a war weapon. The border it's close. Systematic violation of human rights, financed with the tax of the democratic European Union citizens. The migrants organize themselves in spaces like this and construct spaces; support nets in Moroccan territory, confronting and resisting this way the European politics. In the forest of Benyounes, they organized themselves from origin communities. In February of 2005, decided between all the community's, record this video, to made visible their situation, in with they report the systematic violation of their human rights, the absolutely abandonment from the NGO's, Associations an Human Rights Institutions, an they demand their citizens condition and they require their rights as human beings.