Ten Years of Walls and Borders
It's a sunny mid-autumn day, the orange light illuminating the brightly colored walls of the house. I'm sitting across from Claudio Paletto and Maddalena Merlino, in a warm, familiar atmosphere. I'm there to hear about Walls and Borders, the collective film made in 2009 for International Help Onlus, which has toured the world over over the years.
“How did the idea for an ensemble film come about?” I asked first. As a young filmmaker, I'd never encountered a film like this; nowadays, competitiveness is more prized than collaboration. From that moment on, for an hour, I was immersed in the pulsating life of this film, in the story of its creators, in an idea of independent cinema that has the ability to glimpse with the naked eye all the critical issues of a world that has yet to understand and discover its problems.
Claudio Paletto and Armando Ceste had known each other since the 80s. Armando was the founder of the Collettivo Cinema Militante in Turin, and Claudio was a member. Together, they participated in several collective films, such as one about the Fiat workers, helping to create a network of independent filmmakers united by the same ideologies for a committed, collaborative, and militant cinema.
Both knew the founders of the nonprofit organization International Help, founded in 1994 and dedicated to providing aid to the world's most disadvantaged areas. Today, they run a hospital in Kabul, fight the slave trade in Guatemala, provide assistance to refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan, and help in other areas in need of protection.
“In 2008, Armando Ceste was already ill, but he wanted to continue making films, a committed form of cinema. […] And so, at a dinner, while thinking about how to raise money for International Help Onlus, the idea came to him of a call to arms for independent and non-independent directors, both Italian and foreign, to create a collective film. 2009 would have been the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, hence the theme of ‘walls and borders.'” Paletto explains.
Eighty-three directors responded to the call; that "infernal machine," as Claudio and Maddalena jokingly call it, had started rolling and swept them away like a wave from a clear sky. "All the directors gave us a great gift by donating their films," says Paletto. The proceeds, in fact, were donated entirely to International Help Onlus.
At this point, with Armando very ill and finding themselves overwhelmed with work to do, Maddalena and Claudio take over the production reins of the film.
“When we received all these shorts, we faced the problem of how to put them together. We didn't want to do a curatorial thing, otherwise the film would have become too much our own, so we decided to rearrange the shorts alphabetically. By pure chance, Walls and Borders opens with the episode about the Gaza wall and ends with the one about a boy doing parkour and climbing over a very high wall. For us, all of this was perfect,” says Maddalena Merlino.
Armando Ceste, “the founding father of this film,” died before seeing the finished work and before being able to contribute his own short film. It is to him that Maddalena and Claudio dedicated Walls and Borders, inserting at the beginning a short film by Armando, the only one not previously released, made six months earlier.
“The title is Movement, and it's the story of a refugee who drowns and washes up on a beach. We're talking about 2008, so this is another precursor to everything that happened later,” says Paletto.
What struck me most about Walls and Borders was the prescient perspective these directors had on the reality around them. I got goosebumps thinking about how the issues they address are now at the center of international debate: racism, immigration, violence against women, war. This is the power of cinema, of a certain kind of cinema, that of looking into the depths of society and bringing to the surface issues that are still buried but are pushing to come to the surface.
Walls and Borders received a primetime slot at the 2009 Turin Film Festival at the Cinema Massimo, where it was screened for five hours. "But the surprising thing," Paletto says, "was the subsequent success it had. From then on, word of mouth spread like wildfire. The response we received around the world was overwhelming. Although it was highly acclaimed in Italy, it was even more successful abroad."
They were guests at the Festival International du Film Court ed Documentaire in Casablanca, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and were also screened in Gaza, Guatemala City, Tunis, Cairo and Montreal.
Today, on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Walls and Borders arrives on Streen. This allows, in addition to renewing support for International Help Onlus, to experience this immense work and decide how to enjoy it: its modularity allows for multiple uses. You can watch it in its entirety or divide it up according to thematic interests. But regardless of all this, it is a resolutely independent film, which champions a concept of cinema that is rarely given much space today: a cinema built on collaboration and noble goals, where established directors, screenwriters, actors, and young filmmakers just starting out work together to create a work that has a tangible impact on the world they live in and can give a voice to all those phenomena that struggle to be brought to attention.