Mediating migration in Ceuta, Melilla and Barcelona: border thinking and transnationalism from below in independent documentary

Abstract

This article analyses Spanish-independent documentaries that deal with issues of immigration in Ceuta, Melilla and Barcelona from 2005 to 2012. Departing from Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ and Hamid Naficy’s systematizations of the ‘interstitial mode of production’ and ‘the independent transnational film genre’, we situate these audiovisual practices as political and cultural interventions from below in recent debates about borders and immigration cinema. We understand these projects as technological, social and political mediations between the experiences of migrants and spectators. Taking into account the diversity of these videos, we explore how they materialize the tensions and violence implicit in the spatial encounters between migrants, local citizens and the film-makers themselves. Thus, we claim that these works challenge extended assumptions about migratory victimization and agency and that they are a significant contribution to debates about human trafficking and its representation in the digital age. Last but not least, we call for more open and flexible histories of national cinemas and international conflicts, which may include independent documentary productions as examples of non-official diplomacy. All in all, the examples discussed in this article directly confront the issue of migration and serve as problematic examples of migration and as problematic examples of thinking from and across borders.

Keywords:

• transnationalism from below
• independent documentary
• border thinking
• Ceuta
• Melilla
• Barcelona

Acknowledgements

We would also like to thank Pilar Monsell and Óscar Pérez for their assistance and kind correspondence; they were always willing to discuss their films and helped us with facts and data about their works.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hundreds of immigrants tried to jump over the fences in Ceuta and Melilla in September and October 2005, a number unsurpassed until 2014. With 2005, figures reaching more than 700 attempts a day, Moroccan and Spanish surveillance and policing methods of the area were reinforced, and the Spanish Government constructed a third fence in Melilla. Throughout elsewhere in Spain, 2005 was also marked by riots and measures taken by immigrant collectives and the Spanish Government to legalize the state of the sin papeles, or undocumented (Orce 2005; Tremmlett 2005). In Barcelona, 2005 also represents the year after the celebrations of the Fòrum de les Cultures, a multicultural international event that took place throughout 2004 and entailed the urban transformation of a large part of the maritime zone of the city, among other things (Delgado 2007).

2. A similar strategy is developed in La forêt (The Forest, Colectivo Frontera Sur and Àlex Muñoz 2005), a film in which the film-makers handed the camera to immigrants so that they could shoot their daily lives in the Moroccan forest next to Ceuta. The film can be seen online for free at http://www.ru-a.org/2012/02/la-foret-colectivo-frontera-sur-spain.html and http://www.desorg.org/titols/la-foret/.

3. Llorenç Soler has been one of the most persistent and persuasive film-makers to work with issues of internal and cross-border migration, beginning with 1960s films such as Será tu tierra (This Will Be Your Land, 1964) and El largo viaje hacia la ira (Long Journey to Rage, 1969) and extending to later works like Ciudadanos bajo sospecha (Citizens under Suspicion, 1994) and Saïd (1998), among many others.

4. The articulation of Pérez’s film around this spatial dispositif, a systematic set-up that structures the audiovisual experience of the film, follows one of the most extended and exciting trends in contemporary experimental documentary, with key examples like Tishe! (Hush! Victor Kossakovsky 2002). For a thorough survey of the use of cinematic dispositifs in recent international art cinema, see Martin (2011).

5. It should be noted that other European film-makers who also share a perspective from below have also paid attention to Spanish border zones. The films of the French Sylvain Georges and the German Christian von Borries provide examples of that perspective. Though we have focused on Spanish film-makers in this article, these other visions should be taken into consideration in future work.

6. A recent collection about multiculturalism in Spain poses questions like: ‘Is Spain a landscape of unproblematic multicultural coexistence or a stage for tragic tensions (minorities-nationalism) against the background of an invisible but unstoppable process of homogenization?’ (Corbalán and Mayock 2015, xviii). This kind of dichotomous logic should be debunked in favour of more flexible, complex analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number CSO2014-52750-P]: ‘Transnational relations in Spanish-American digital cinema: the cases of Spain, Mexico, and Argentina’.