The Followed Roads to Europe: Diasporic Documentary from a Gender Perspective

Ana SolanoTamara Bueno DoralNoelia García Castillo

“No existimos”

Introduction

• Utility of the vanguard documentary film to express the reality of the arduous roads followed by refugee women to the impregnable Europe.

• To date, traditional and experimental cinema has been the main audiovisual media to articulate the experiences of transit.

• Due to the theoretical and social content, we could coincide with Diasporic Cinema: – Diasporic Cinema deals with movement related to

nationality, ethnicity, race, gender or sexuality in an interconnected world.

– Diasporic Cinema is transnational and heterotopic.

• This Non-places are:– Physical and mental spaces that divest the human

being of his identity, relations and history (Ponzanesi, 2012).

– A delay in the transit, in a transitory period in which identification processes are postponed (Tsianos y Melitopoulos, 2007).

• We reflect on the element of transit, expressed on various routes linked to life and death, on the connection between consciousness and unconsciousness, on the absence of an identity.

• We find thematic coincidences considered in this conference and in the documentary “We Don´t Exist”: belonging and identity when traveling through diverse borders, confinement and homesickness.

• Nevertheless, we use a different perspective related to the tools of experimental cinema.

Research process

• A theoretical-social continuous about exiled and refugee women in France and Spain.

• Main objective: delve into the causes of these problems from a gender perspective.

• Lack of similar audiovisual work that describes in depht the vulnerability of women refugees.

• Their nonexistence is expressed in three areas:– Mass media: sensationalism, victimization,

revelation of personal data. Virtually nonexistent for national and regional newspapers.

– NGOs highlight the special vulnerability of women refugees: dependents, gender discrimination. Lack of statistical data distinguishing between men and women refugees.

– On most occasions, women are not aware of the gender violence they are suffering. Victims of human trafficking can also apply for asylum.

Production

• Documentary is a model of cinema linked to knowledge.

• Our production process is not subordinated to conventional film production and its political and institutional mechanism.

• The production of “We Don´t Exist” has been atypical and complex.

• Freedom to research and denounce an issue intrinsically linked to the structures of the patriarchal system.

Language, script and direction

• “We Don´t Exist” ends in a film essay. • No strategies nor narrative limitations are

observed.• The film creates a dialogue with the existing

reality and surpass the structural formalism of the aesthetic vanguard.

• Images have as objective creating a parallel discourse, a narrative that is produced with different digital techniques and formats.

• The narrative structure is not subject to temporal space.

– Asking questions to reach our objective.– The interrelation of the semantic material with the metatext

originated in the internal dialectic of the documentary.– The aesthetic part breaks the unity of spacetime.

TrailerTrailer Web page

Thanks for your kind attention.

Ana Solano anasolano2046@gmail.com Tamara Bueno Doral trbueno@ucm.es Noelia García Castillo noeliagcastillo@gmail.com