Our project

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The impossibility of seeing beyond the first fabricated veil of a city makes me sad. It is as though these places knew I am a volatile person who could easily decide to stay in them if they gave me the hint of a secret, a little offer of happiness that I could decide to grasp. Instead, at first sight, they show me faces that make me want to leave, to keep on looking for a haven far away. These places are built to scare the visitors… they are already overrun, overpopulated, tired of new settlers. Not only are they legally closed (papers, frontiers, bureaucracy, police), but the depth of the life there is codified to a passerby.

That is why this project is a precious opportunity to go past this barrier and understand a place from the insight of one that, like us, was a passerby but decided to stay. We come here hunting for the secrets of a city as presented to us by people who were not born here and had to discover the city by themselves. With time, pain, effort, luck or help, they were able to

penetrate into the core of life in the place they chose to live in. We will ask them to share it with us, volatile passersby, in an attempt to understand why somebody would decide to stay in a place. By this, because of contrast, we could also get a feeling on what made them leave their native land in the first place.

In the end, the insight of one that has arrived to a new place is different to the one who was born there because his/her references are different. His/her idea of beauty, for example, could have to do with his/her previous home. We are convinced that a place is built not from the views presented to us as postcards, but from the small places who are full of meaning and stories. We are looking for these places and we ask for immigrants to be our accomplices.

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We want to find people who have lived in another place (could be their native country/city) for some time before moving to the place we portray. We want to ask them to take us to a place that they consider beautiful and meaningful, a secret place where a story took place. It would ideally be a story that has to do with making them feel secure, at home, happy. A place that they discovered on their first days-weeks when arriving to their new city would be ideal. We would show this place as a secret haven, trying to make justice to it in our aesthetic portrayal of it.

If the place has changed to when this story took place, we want the person to tell us how it changed; if there are people there who signify something from the past, we would expect maybe an interaction; if the memory took place with somebody else, we could try to also take with us this person and show a conversation between them.

Stories are what gives us strength when times are difficult and therefore, they also define an identity that goes hand in hand with our personal history. Stories, and particularly memories, evoke from us feelings that can show who we are by the way we tell them. Being in the place where such story happened is an interesting engine for evocation. Therefore, we intend to listen to their stories and let them speak, rather than in an interview fashion, in a conversational atmosphere.

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We want to talk about the difficulty of establishing oneself somewhere and calling it home. Migrating to a new place is an experience full of obstacles, frustrations, encounters, growth and blisses. There are always sociopolitical, legal and economical aspects to be considered, but in our film we do not want to use such language. We want to talk about the experience of migration as a an inner journey, as a secret and personal experience. We want to film not the great scheme of migration, but the small stories that signify deeply what it is to discover a new land and a new beginning.

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Our characters give voice to our own journey through these cities. We are searching for a haven, for a place to call home and we are rather clueless in terms of what could make us define our next stop in life. Both of us, the filmmakers, have gone out of our native cities to look for something we cannot quite understand. It is something that has to do with growth, dreams and happiness, but we just cannot put our fingers into it and define it, name it. In this journey, we want to net together the experiences/insights of the people we meet with our own approach to this issue. Therefore, in between our encounters we will film the journey of a hypothetical