Walls and Borders – Part 2

After the Balkan War, the last war of the 20th century in Europe, the film aims to be a small but uncompromising manifesto against all conflict. It does so by following the children's actions, observing their games and adventures, but also their confusion, their infirmities, their deaths. The future lies before the eyes of these survivors. Our task remains to continue telling the story.

Leo, a twenty-year-old recently released from prison, recounts the vision of his escape, combining memory and improvisation, in a visionary journey through the landscape of his skin.

While filming a documentary, Pasquale, an 18-year-old with autism, discovers the video camera and the image, perhaps of himself, that it reflects.

Walter Benjamin's escape from Nazism had Port Bou as its final and definitive stop.

Zena el Khalil is an artist and writer. Born in London, she lives and works in Beirut. Her work encompasses various forms of expression: painting, performance, and installation, employing a variety of techniques, including collage and writing. Violence and war are the main themes she addresses; in her works, soldiers, men and women, and civilians are adorned with plastic flowers, glitter, toy soldiers, fabrics, jewelry, and other objects collected in Beirut.
In addition to international solo and group exhibitions, el Khalil is very active in promoting and representing Arab artists in numerous cultural projects.
During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the artist started a blog (beirutupdate.blogspot.com) to recount the 33-day "siege" through her personal perspective and the testimonies of those around her. The blog received international press attention. She recently published her first book, the autobiography "Beirut I Love You."

The intertwining of rural and urban areas is increasingly intense. The story of Silvano Galfione, a shepherd and cheesemaker from the Pinerolo area, documents the clash between the urban spirit that reinhabits the countryside and the farmer who works the land. The stench, the mosquitoes, and the natural inconveniences of the farmer become unbearable for the "rural citizen."
Galfione's story features sequences showing fragments of the Pinerolo countryside crossed by the ring road. Walls and borders of a "rurbanization."

Telephone conversations between citizen-spectators and local politicians on the key issue of foreign immigration in Italy.

On an ordinary day during exercise in a courtyard at the Vallette prison in Turin, a volleyball game among inmates becomes increasingly unpredictable.

Between the walls, that of the dead. The dead enclosed within the wall. Walled up dead. Ordered, equal, indiscriminate. What we present is a rare document. A bastard soul of an ignoble person crosses the threshold of eternal rest, an elderly angel welcomes him and is likely suggesting something very important that we, living humans, cannot hear. The bastard soul proceeds with the arrogant pace of its existence to the end of the long corridor, opens the door it was not supposed to open, and disappears beyond the threshold. The elderly angel had warned him. We cannot understand.

The short film questions the mechanism of vision, the system itself being overturned and reworked. The screen becomes a gateway to a two-way, mirrored vision. The actors, too, wait for the audience to entertain and engage them, and in the meantime, they live their filmic existence by spying, fully aware of being watched. In this Dadaist game, on a second level, small comical spaces open up, along with an undisguised critique of reality TV and its viewers.

The cry of pain with which Angelo enters life, forced into it by the selfishness of adults, remains indelible within him.

A few days spent in a world apart, separated from our own by the seemingly insurmountable barrier of disability. Every day, however, there are those who cross that boundary, forging a viable path with perseverance.

An impromptu theatrical performance on a tram in the middle of the city. Two grotesque characters alternate readings of old and new laws: the racist manifesto of 1938, the security package of 2009. While a diverse and surprised audience discovers disturbing similarities, a migrant reflects on the condition of Italy today.

Sarajevo, September 1998. A boy approaches the city, descending from the hills dotted with white tombs. It's a journey home, his; or perhaps it's just a desire living in a dream.

Several characters read and comment, each translated into their native language and adapted to their own situation, the following sentence by the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon:
"The noir man learns from himself his own language and culture and adopts the cells of the white man... The survival of the man and the guilt of being black in a similar manner to the white man: the deviant of a noir man who wears a white mask... Well, in fact, the discovery is done, it's too much late. Not belonging to any culture, the noir man has lost his identity, in him remains that the noir man has lost his identity, in him remains that the humiliation and the haine of himself."

Who hasn't dreamed of controlling the flow of time with a VCR remote control? Who hasn't dreamed of speeding it up or slowing it down, making it move forward or backward to achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible? Rough Reverse is precisely such a dream, in which man is no longer dominated by the advancing hands of the clock, but vice versa.

The reality of every single individual is now invaded by the power of television, which controls and "globalizes" minds to the detriment of individualism and one's personality. Television serves to alter the perception of reality, with the aim of developing a rich world of rampant and flattening conformism. The aforementioned themes are the meaning of the work in question, entitled "Rape." In the video, rape between television and human beings is represented in a metaphorically physical way, primarily with sounds and noises of mockery and crying.

A woman, through fortuitous circumstances, finds her daughter, who had wandered away years earlier, in a city shelter full of homeless people. Her mother, Ivana, does everything in her power to reintegrate her daughter, Mimì, into the social context closest to her: that of an educated, middle-income person in a large city. Mimì seems to meekly accept this change of regime and, for a time, adheres to it in appearance, general demeanor, and in her willingness to work. But Mimì's meekness only conceals her curiosity to see how far this maternal "rescue" will take her; once she deems the experiment over, the girl will return to the stray environment to which she feels she belongs, totally separated from her mother's, even though they are in the same city, physically close. Each of them, in her own enclosure, or in her own apartment, seems to know that this separation is now definitive.

Industrial architecture: a symbol of a job that no longer exists and, for many, the illusion of another existence. A modern storyteller in the guise of a wall painter recounts the journey of life through images: a child is born, grows up, encounters war, love, a new life is born, sets out on a journey, and becomes a ghost. Masks, nightmares in the dreams of a humanity too often indifferent and oblivious to its own horrors.

In the middle of the desert, an Israeli checkpoint. Two young Palestinians, a boy and his sister, try to cross it, but with little success.
Not far away, an Israeli soldier observes the scene, without intervening.
That same evening, the Israeli soldier is drinking alcohol in a bar. He's alone, looking sad, and thinking back to what he'd witnessed. Suddenly, a young boy enters the bar and hands him a note. The soldier reads it, and his face relaxes, his expression changing into an attempted smile.
The soldier reaches the dock, starts the motorboat, and sets sail, sailing several miles from the mainland. The speedboat cuts through the waves toward the horizon until it reaches a small rowboat, stopped in the middle of the sea, carrying the two young Palestinians.
The two boats come to touch, the Palestinian boy helps his sister transfer to the other boat, then grabs the oars and heads back towards the mainland, while the Israeli soldier hugs the Palestinian girl and kisses her passionately.
Their love story is possible where there are no walls and borders… it is only possible in the middle of the sea.

A Tijuana il ya la frontière. Here on the label « la ligne ».
In Tijuana there's a border. Here it's known as The Line.
There's a border in Tijuana. It's known as "La Linea."