The Canary Island Project: Project Description
The Canary Island Project (working title) is an experimental documentary, currently in post-production, about three Sierra Leonian migrants trapped in the margins of the contemporary nation-state.
The observational film follows the day-to-day lives of three African men enmeshed in the tourism economy of the Canary Islands, a tiny Spanish archipelago off the west coast of Africa. The film reflects on the shifting nature of Europe’s boundaries as lived from within this liminal zone.
The video begins with Bakarr's song, a meandering nighttime walk through downtown Las Palmas, the main port city of the Canary Islands. A young man in his twenties, Bakarr moves through empty parking lots, past shops advertising in a mixture of Spanish and Arabic, abandoned construction sites and cheap tourist hotels. He sings a ballad about his journey, a mix of English and Sierra Leonian Krio: "We traveled from Dakar to Mauritania, from Mauritania to Las Palmas. Las Palmas is the place we stay.”
Willie, his companion, is older and Saturnine. “Shut up, it's time to stop singing now,” he tells Bakarr. The engineer on the small fishing boat in which they both arrived, he sees Las Palmas as a dismal location of empty time, a holding pattern filled with thoughts of returning home.
Willie's friend, Alhassan, struggles to carry an oversized television through the door of his narrow apartment. Liberating but cumbersome, the TV set falls as he carries it down the stairs. It bounces – he picks it back up. The video follows Alhassan's transactions as he attempts to illegally stash a stockpile of electronics in the hull of Willie's boat, in the hopes that the boat will leave and take the goods to his family.
The year is 2008, however, and the financial crisis has already begun to deepen. Construction projects are freezing, and droves of African migrants have begun to live on the fishing vessels with which they made the journey across. Some of them, like Willie and Bakarr, remain locked in the limbo of the docklands for several months or several years. Others, like Alhassan, unable to find work and unable to return home, are held in the grips of a similarly paralyzing double bind.
Tracking moments of hope, desperation, boredom, and resistance, these stories speak to wider cultural and economic shifts in a moment of recession and crisis.
Credits:
Production: Christian Stayner
Direction/camera: John Hulsey
Editing: John Hulsey and Christian Stayner
With Edwin Williams, Alhassan Kamara, Bakarr Makura,
the crew of the Bona-2, and Guardia Civil, Las Palmas.
Shot on location in Gran Canaria, Spain
Funded by The Film Studies Center
and Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard
Fiscal sponsor: Film Forum, New York