“I live on the campus of the Gaston Berger University at Saint Louis, Senegal. I have met there Africans from different parts of the continent. Of all these friends, one of them, a Senegalese, has stuck in my mind. He was the first to speak to me of my difference, the fact that I come from Central Africa. He let me become acquainted with his society, its taboos. Today I do not know where he is. I just know that one day he left on a pirogue headed for Europe. From his absence came the desire to make a film on our meeting, our differences, the places we crossed, the friends we knew.”

A series of videos that trace the routes of several African immigrants through Italy to France where they have ultimately joined the French Foreign Legion. An emigrant draws on a map of the world the route he has followed. In this way, creates a bridge between the feelings of an emigrant being tossed back and forth and the superficiality of a geographical map.

A series of videos that trace the routes of several African immigrants through Italy to France where they have ultimately joined the French Foreign Legion. An emigrant draws on a map of the world the route he has followed. In this way, creates a bridge between the feelings of an emigrant being tossed back and forth and the superficiality of a geographical map.

This documentary explores migration to Spain from the Senegalese point of view.

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.

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.

Something happened on the Spanish-Moroccan border in Autumn 2005. A thing that is still happening today in other places and in other ways. Hundreds of sub-Saharans used ladders to cross a European border. Weapons, rubber bullets, death. Thousands were deported to the Sahara desert. Death. Spanish television broadcast images of an accelerated war. Just bodies, not individuals. Something we watched. Returning to the place where it all happened we find nothing but empty space. A landscapes without traces. What remains, that fence. How is it possible to create new representations that don't get lost in the oversaturation of images that present migrants as victims? Others had already asked themselves the same question. A group of Congolese refugees is stuck in Morocco waiting to reach Europe. They have created a theatre piece based on their experiences of migration. In the room where they live each day, it takes shape as a self-representation of each step along the path. But it is not a finished work. There is no audience and no stage, just a work waiting for its ending.