There is an old brothel in Seville close by one of the city’s busiest highways. Now, the building has been turned into a refugee centre. This is where the subjects of Juan Antonio Moreno Amador’s effervescent new documentary Welcome To Spain, world-premiering at Hot Docs, have come to build themselves new lives.
They range from the doe-eyed Omnia, a little girl from Yemen who can’t hide her delight at being enrolled in a Spanish school, to Amalia, who was a teacher in Venezuela; from Marouane, a young gay Moroccan, and the Fares family from Libya, to the multilingual Madi, who endured a perilous journey by sea across the Mediterranean to reach Spain.
This isn’t the first time the director has dealt with refugees. Boxing For Freedom (2015) was about Sadaf Rahimi, the best female boxer in Afghanistan. “She was living in my house for three months,” the director says of his subject who asked for asylum after coming to Spain for a festival screening of the documentary.
As soon as the director discovered the former whorehouse in Seville, he thought immediately, “Wow! This is my place.”
Don’t expect a grim, social realist wallow in the miseries of immigrant life. Welcome To Spain is upbeat and often humorous. The many protagonists learn to deal with Spanish culture and tradition… and they’re sometimes baffled by local rituals.
“They raise their dogs here as if they were their children,” family patriarch Mr Fares notes in bemusement of how many Spaniards seem to be unmarried or not to have kids of their own.
“A lot of stories about refugees tell the story like a drama, like a tragedy,” Moreno Amador points out. “To start a new life as a refugee is hard, but can also be funny.” Rather than dwell on the hardships, he was determined to approach his subject from “another point of view” and to throw satire and irony into the mix.
More than 200 people are housed in the old brothel. The director spent three months living alongside them. In spite of the sometimes jocular tone of the documentary, the director went to great lengths always to treat his subjects with dignity and respect. The camera tends to follow them at a discrete distance.
“I know very well the reality of refugees’ [lives],” he states. He also often shows events from the refugees’ point of view. “I was keen to find out what they think about us, the Spanish people.”
Moreno Amador has his own production outfit, Making Doc, which he and his partner Silvia Venegas Venegas, co-founded in 2010. Their films have screened in more than 500 festivals and have won over 100 prizes. “Our philosophy is to tell the stories worth telling – stories that transform points of view and break stereotypes,” he declares.
The director also has a side job, teaching and giving lectures on documentary. When working with student filmmakers, he is always looking to “discover what is happening inside” his pupils. He is less interested in their mastery of technique than in what they feel and what they have to say.
He and Venegas Venegas produced and directed several feature docs, among them 2016’s Kafana (Enough Already!)about Saharawi refugees who’ve built themselves a new community complete with healthcare and education deep in the Algerian desert. Now they are turning toward fiction. He is also hatching his first dramatic feature. It’s too early to reveal precise details of the project but he reveals he is turning to fiction because this particular story isn’t “possible to tell like a documentary.”
Don’t expect him to turn his back on docs, though. “Documentary, reality [on screen], that is my soul,” he pronounces.
Yes, the director is still in touch with the subjects of Welcome To Spain and his other documentaries. If he is ever in a position to help them, he will do so. “For me, they are like a family. They teach me a lot of things about life.”
His documentary is due to be released in Spanish cinemas in June. The filmmakers are currently looking for a sales agent to represent the film internationally.
Welcome To Spain is one of the ten films selected for the Changing Face of Europe programme at Hot Docs, organised by European Film Promotion.
