Walls and Borders

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."

STAINES is a journey. From Baghdad to Chernobyl, passing through Kabul, Beirut, and Bosnia. A story accompanied by the chords of an acoustic guitar and marked by the crucial places of an invisible border, between war and peace, violence and contamination. Between the dark and the illuminated.

A woman entrusts her secret to a man. An incurable wound, which, thanks to listening, sometimes stings a little less.

With an old white scooter and a wooden box full of grocery bags, Sara, like every day, makes the rounds of the elderly to whom she delivers groceries to their homes.

Arms of salvation or bars of restraint, spiritual barricades or release valves, passageways to sublime or jaws of repression, travel checkpoints or thresholds of transcendence, feeding hands or delivery limiters, walls against escapism or delimiting borders. Arms and bars control passages.

Arms of salvation or bars of containment, spiritual barricades or safety valves, paths to the sublime or jaws of repression, passenger customs or thresholds of transcendence, hands that nourish or limit liberation, walls against escape from reality or demarcating borders. Arms and bars control passages.

The subjective view of a crossing. An external and internal journey, in an impressionistic vein.

The video is a summary of a long interview that Luana Rovini gave me before her death in April 2009, about her experience as a terminally ill cancer patient.

In a seemingly borderless city, three young people of three different nationalities meet, or chase each other, without ever meeting. Sunil arrives from Bangalore to participate in the Democracy Biennale. He runs a nonprofit organization that focuses on updating intellectual property laws and new technologies. Marcia is English, lives in Turin, and works for the magazine that invited Sunil. Sabine, a friend of Sunil and Marcia, is French, an artist, and even though she never meets her friends, she always manages, in her own way, to be present.

At a café table, Claudia engages in a heated discussion with her friend Sofia. She tries to explain her thoughts, the reason for her outrage, and her desire to do something to help those who, far from their everyday surroundings, are truly in need. Her world, compared to the problems of the rest of the world, feels too small for her. Sofia's words and her attempts to explain that she certainly can't change things are in vain. Two points of view, two thoughts that can sometimes coexist within each of us, are revealed here in their dialectic, in the friendly clash between two ordinary girls.

Gypsy Dreams: A video-artistic documentation project launched inside the V. Germagnano gypsy camp in Turin.

The last letter to the fiancée of Bruno Cibrario (nom de guerre Nebiolo), a communist partisan shot at the age of 21 against the wall of the Martinetto shooting range in Turin.

Lori sleeps restlessly: a state of inertia keeps her restrained...

Interview with Somasundaram Paskaran, a survivor of the Sri Lankan civil war.

The title is (almost) the same as that of a group of Franz Kafka's short stories. It's only for this, and for the dizzying enormity of the work evoked here, that I owe him for this film. For the fact that he existed at all, however, my gratitude remains infinite.

The two "doubts," graphically expressed in Latin and Arabic characters and representing the two shores of the Mediterranean with their two cultures, depending on their position can form a black awareness ribbon, a symbol of mourning, or a heart, as it appears at the end of the video. It all depends on the perspective from which you observe them and, also, on their relative position, as they are in motion. It's a question of perspective.

The desire to gather, from someone who has lived, traveled, fought, and suffered a great deal, elements of experience about "walls." Real ones, which come after—and before—the metaphorical ones. Prisons. Our cultural barriers. Historically detrimental to the female element. Marginalized then and now. Inside and outside prisons and social constraints. Told by those confined to a home they love, but cannot abandon. And, through the use of split screen, the description of a prism of experiences and suffering, in its gestures, with the interpretative code of communication, analog and digital, as the hallmark of a life spent toward an ideal dimension.

Against the sun-drenched wall of the former San Salvi psychiatric hospital in Florence, the shadows of trees move off-camera, while a double voice—it has a kind of echo within it—repeats words written by a patient admitted there in the 1960s.

The short film is loosely based on excerpts from Barbara Garlaschelli's book "FRAMMENTS. STORIES FROM A FORTINO DI PERIFERIA", published by Moby Dick (in the "I saggi Moby Dick" series), from which fragments of an interview with Matteo, one of the patients at the Milan psychosocial center, have been reinterpreted.

No walls, a man and a wall in an ancestral rite made of struggle, tears, prayer, bandages, death.

Often following the same patterns, power opposes the demands of peace, freedom, and defense of the vulnerable. The most bloodthirsty and uncivilized policies are justified by false stereotypes and lies. Those, like Giuseppe Pinelli and Roberto Franceschi, who were killed for fighting against discrimination and for respect for humanity, continue to provide courage and positive inspiration even in the darkest periods of history.

The illegal immigrant is an outsider who exists in a legislative and cultural spatial border zone. The illegal immigrant doesn't exist, but it concerns us all.

A homeless woman receives a gesture of solidarity from a Nigerian woman. The immigrant offers her a plate of food she has just cooked for herself and her family. The homeless woman, despite her neediness, doesn't trust what's on her plate; she smells it but nothing more. Her preconceptions about the "unknown" are evidently stronger than her hunger. She sets the plate on the floor and, forgetting about it, resumes her begging. But suddenly, someone absentmindedly kicks the plate. The gesture draws the woman's attention to the plate and its contents, piquing her curiosity, and she decides to try the strange concoction. After a few bites, she realizes that the food is good, indeed, very good. The African woman, with a small gesture of solidarity, and the homeless woman with a small effort, have, at least for a moment, broken down one of the biggest walls: that of mistrust.

Mostar... The scorching wind sweeps through the deserted streets. A few stray cats fight for control of the garbage. I think we should start asking ourselves what legacy we will leave to future generations.

Thirty years after the Basaglia Law, our film aims to recount the experience of a time that seems to be returning.
The closure of the Novara asylum meant, then, the end of a tragic and desolate place that, with its climate of violence and oppression, with its total frustration of basic needs, with its often inhumane living conditions, instead of healing, paradoxically created pathology.
Our short documentary "passes" through old corridors, abandoned rooms, and rediscovered objects that, thanks to the voices of the medical records of the time, bring back memories of never-forgotten suffering.
The closure of the asylum was therefore an act of courage born from a widespread atmosphere of concern and defense towards the weak, the insane, and those who were different. An atmosphere far removed from today's culture, which is proving increasingly sensitive to power relations rather than relationships of support, ready to marginalize, out of fear, those who, with their madness, inevitably remind us that their emotions, desires, thoughts, and fears are ultimately the emotions, desires, thoughts, and fears that live in the deepest regions of our hearts and minds.
This is why we believe it is appropriate to remember, once again, the mental asylum, once a place of confinement and suffering, now a tragic metaphor for exclusion.

A contemporary interpretation of some key concepts of the Hagakure (the Samurai code), developed by a practitioner of Parkour, the urban discipline whose aim is to move as efficiently as possible by overcoming obstacles and tracing seemingly impossible paths.