SYNOPSIS

Moussa, Soulaymana and Amadou are three young Guinean friends who arrived in Palermo two years ago; their friendship compensates for the distance of their family and helps them to face the new reality where everything seems complicated. Precious finds a new family in her basketball friend Gianluca; together they talk about their first loves and confide in each other as they have never been able to do with anyone else. Kelly and Ismael are still projected into their past relationships that pervade their thoughts and prevent them from building new bonds here in Italy.

L’amour n’a pas de frontière is a journey in the Palermo of migrants, told through the transversal theme of love understood as search, nostalgia, complicity and lack.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

This film was made starting from a participatory video workshop held in Palermo in 2019. The workshop involved a group of young asylum seekers and non-asylum seekers and focused on the possibility of building a group internal self-narrative, alternative to the narratives that usually tell the migration phenomenon. The intention to give back their point of view, avoiding banality and easy rhetoric, was implemented by creating authentic relationships with them and sharing every narrative and stylistic choice.

The structure of the film is made of four chapters that create a single narrative made of references and counterpoints. The red thread of love, investigated in its various nuances, allowed us to explore in depth the lives of the boys, their everyday life, their concerns and nostalgia, supporting the spontaneous flow of their thoughts and their reality made of misunderstandings, confidences and contradictions.

The devices used were those of self-narration and staging. The boys filmed each other, and have sometimes made explicit the meta-cinematographic mechanism of self-narration. The use of staging helped us create a frame of situations where we could spontaneously improvise and digress into our intimate dreams and concerns, failures and aspirations.

The film is therefore articulated by merging different styles and techniques, functional to the co-authorship of a heterogeneous group of people with experiences, points of view and needs parallel but shared.

THE WORKSHOP

It was a 6 months video-participatory workshop that took place in Palermo in 2019. It was addressed to young people aged 18-30 who wished to create collective and self narratives through the language of documentary filmmaking. The group was composed of 12 young men, some of which were asylum seekers of the Sprar of Palermo.

The filming process gave them the opportunity to become active narrators of their stories, in opposition to the passive role they usually have in the contemporary media reality.
During the workshop they learned the foundation of sound recording, video shooting and self narration and they realised the medium length film “L’amour n’a pas de frontières” which tells stories about life, thoughts and dreams on friendship and love from the point of view of young people that are trying to re build their affective network.

The film was screened at the Apollo 11 cinema in Rome in November 2019.