[ Music ]
[ Silence ]
>> As one of the directors of a film
about the southernmost borders of the EU,
I am going to show you some of the footages
and interviews we made during our research
in the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla.
in the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.
We set out to discover what the border and the border fences
meant for the residents of these cities that are stuck
between two borders, the national sea
border and the man-made border fence,
and how their lives are determined by these dynamics.
As you will see in the following sample I have selected,
the interviewees talk about the border in terms
that are not just limited to physical barriers.
They also talk about them as narratives shaped by media,
by politics that dictate them, and by structures
that determine who belongs and who doesn't.
They talk about how borders influence economies, language,
and identity, and how they are felt in waiting lines,
in who crosses with ease and who is stopped,
in the way people speak about migration, and in the spaces
that divide communities within a city itself.
We spoke to migrants and citizens from
both Christian and Muslim backgrounds.
These poets, philosophers, musicians, bikers, teachers,
historians, and cross-border commuters talked to us
about the plurality of experiences in these borderlands.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> Criticism of the media's role was mentioned
as not only shaping border narratives, but shaping borders.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> They talk about the border in its many forms.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> We were also told about the general ignorance
about these cities, about their original inhabitants,
and the history of settlement in these areas.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> As sites of crossing and linguistic mixing,
these cities reflect how migration creates new hybrid
forms of communication, which is dismissed as informal or illegitimate.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> And they talked about border as a dynamic
and selective structure, and framed Ceuta and Melilla
as places where movement is controlled
differently, depending on privilege.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> They talked about bearing witness
to the exploitative conditions of crossing.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> Apart from the violent, restrictive conditions
of crossing, these stories revealed invisible economies
that depend on this movement, and was mostly felt after the pandemic.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> These accounts not only reinforced the idea
that Ceuta and Melilla cannot be closed doors,
but also challenged the idea of fortress Europe.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> In contrast to the fleeting portrayals
in dominant media narratives, the cities themselves serve
as living testaments that remember and stand in defiance
of fortress Europe's politics, which continue
to treat human lives with indifference.
[ Foreign Language ]
>> Eleven years after the tragedy of Tarajal,
voices of resistance remain, challenging the politics
that continue to treat human life as disposable.
[ Music ]