AHIR/DEMÀ (Yesterday/tomorrow) – Documentary 2019

Fourteen young Moroccan newcomers to a reception centre for minors in Spain agree to participate in a theatre workshop. It is the thin line that separates their recent past from their uncertain future. What is theatre but a full experience of the present?

‘I received a phone call from Pont Flotant: Did I want to accompany them during the workshop that they were going to give at the autonomous government ́s Reception Centre for Minors in Buñol, and film a documentary? I would have freedom of concept and duration. I only had to adhere to the conditions established by the authorities acting as legal guardian of those minors. I accompanied Jesus Muñoz and Pau Pons of Pont Flotant in the first session. Two days later I returned for the following one. I repeated the following week. And so on for two months.

Eventually only fourteen Moroccan teenagers, all boys, finished the process. It was evident that every one of them had risked his life to be there. Without wishing to delve into this dramatic transit, I was interested in confronting the past that they had just left behind in Morocco with their own outlook towards the future. And between one and the other, their present: that theatrical workshop. That is where the documentary takes place, in the line that separates the words yesterday (“ahir”) and tomorrow (“demà”).

I did not need to invent anything: those teenagers were radiating life and positivity during the workshop. I wanted to make a documentary with the maximum respect for the boys, neither paternalistic, nor loaded with sentimentality. I wanted to show them with names and faces in order to humanise them, and for the spectators to feel empathy towards them: They could be our children, couldn’t they? I wanted to expose the reverse side —positive in this case— of a terrible reality caused by the European Union’s criminal migration policy.’

Raúl Riebenbauer