Sylvain George

Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. In transit through the city, Malik and his friends, miners of Moroccan origin, try to reach Europe by any means necessary. Day after night, they are up to no good, running the city in all directions, turning it upside down like a glove, like seismographs revealing the most burning present like the movements of the most distant past, taking all the risks to cross the barriers, to cross the waters of the port, climbing on the boats… Stay there, as if dead before being born? Rather "burn the sea" than die before having lived.

Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. A buffer zone where European migration policies, their challenges and their consequences are read and shown. A place towards which converge the migrants of the Maghreb. They are "those who burn". They have nothing else to lose except wanting to live to the end.

Sylvain George crosses Paris in 2015 and 2016 with an “unaccompanied foreign minor”, as the official term has it. This splendid whirlwind in black-and-white mixes the details of iconic monuments – an equestrian statue, the obelisk or the big wheel – with life in the streets.

A young man shouts at the sea. Shot near Calais.

This movie is a fragment of the demonstration of May 1st and social movements in the year 2016.

In the dark night, near the port of Calais, of a raid against migrants. In the dark, of a political night...

This film is composed of fragments escaped from Qu’ils reposent en révolte (Des figures de Guerres). Fragments of voices, laughter and rage, snatches of words, images and memory, the words near and far; the breathe of the wind, the gesture of the sun at the sunset, the reflections red-blood; the raids of the police, processions, warriors, court of injustice ... For a map of the violence inflicted on migrants, the repetition of the colonial movement, and the unacceptability of the “world as it is”.

This film is a newsreel, which presents some views, scenes and mo-ments of the class struggle in Madrid. The “Movimiento 15-M” is the first major “movement” in the beginning of the 21st century. A deep movement, trans-border and trans-historical which reactivates and works ideas and concepts that were long thought to be forgotten: demos, logos, revolution ...

Still in Calais, daybreak, a raid is coming to an end. Men come out of the ground, life resumes its course. Sovereignty of certain gestures...

Ode, in black and white, to immigrants, from Calais, from elsewhere.

Situated in the vein of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoievski and Benjamin and of free jazz and punk, this film bears witness to the iniquitous policies that shape our era, the “infernal” nature of certain political lives or black bodies (those of immigrants, emigrants, workers, the unemployed, students...). It operates, as a minority film, in a critical stasis of mythical and mainstream realities, and deals with the issue of revolt and insurrection: excesses, disidentification, unclear reconfiguration... We are presented, through a dialectical reversal, "non-places" that cannot be assimilated, utopias, corps-impossibles

Paris, an open city. Commemorations abound: ruins, winds, tides. Young Iraqi, Afghan or Iranian immigrants wandering the streets, between soup kitchens and improvised campsites. People who, by leaving their lands, plunge public order and bourgeois society into crisis. An emancipation movement becomes deeply melancholic, elegiac: redefining the notion of revolution for a new notion of History.

Paris, October 2005: Inhabitants and undocumented people spontaneously protest against police raids and arrests in the Chateau d'Eau district.

The police disrupt a demonstration in France