Título original: VOCES DISTANTES

Título internacional: DISTANT VOICES PRIVISIONAL

SHORT LOGLINE (100 WORDS)

Vic, (Cataluña–Spain) Vic, a small city enveloped by a thick fog, is the stage for a
meaningful encounter: Multiple pig slaughterhouses employ cheap immigrant
labor workforce, mostly of Islamic origin. In the year 2004, we filmed video
messages, which we sent to their loved ones in physical media form. Twelve
years later, these faces which talk to the camera, these distant voices, resonate
like a premonitory echo over the stormy European skies: the humanitarian drama
of immigration which today threatens to split the horizon into two.
(95 WORDS)
Commented [SH1]: Hay que repetirlo?
Commented [SH2]: Sería posible una forma poética en
inglés que interprete aquello de “cartas filmadas”… entiendo
que “letters” en inglés se refiere a letras, pero quizás algo
que ubique en el contexto del hecho de que ellos reemplazan
por primera vez sus cartas por videos…

Direction and Production:

MARTA HINCAPIÉ URIBE
Catalan1enator@gmail.com
57 3146314485
Medellín – Colombia
SINOPSIS (400 words)

Vic, (Cataluña, Spain) A parallel world that lives amidst the fog. Thousands of
Islamic immigrants make a living by killing pigs for European consumption. On
the screen, a split image: one side depicts a magic carpet ride, crossing through
the thick fog over the outskirts of Vic, full of pig slaughterhouses, until we reach
the town itself, the roofs of its houses, its streets, its plazas. The other, shows the
video messages of the immigrants who inhabit these houses. Their faces look up
at the camera and excitedly wave hello to their friends and relatives back home.

The sound of the cold wind and the fog, the cries of the pigs, the metallic sounds
from the slaughterhouses mix with the immigrants’ voices, promising to soon
return to their homelands and their people. They come from countries as diverse
as Morocco, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Senegal and Palestine. They come here,
drawn by the promise of steady work.

The experiences presented on the split screen introduce the spectator to an

emotional journey based on the human experience of being uprooted: living in a
foreign land, eking out a living far away from your loved ones.

The flyover and the presence of the immigrants, leads to a final encounter: at
Vic’s main plaza, Catalans and immigrants come together to form a human Commented [SH3]: Que tal conservar “plaza Mayor” ¿
castle, their hands and feet over their shoulder, leaning high, representing the
utopia of a multicultural society based on solidarity, if only for a moment.

“Voces distantes” (“Distant Voices”) brings us closer to the human experience

of those immigrants who are forced to move to European lands in order to find
work, while their dreams and hopes fly like magic carpets over the skies that
separate them from their homelands.

(288 palabras)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION (1100 WORDS)

Marta Hincapié Uribe

Lawyer, Social Communicator and documentary filmmaker from the CCEC
School in Barcelona. A resident of Barcelona from 1999 to 2009. A regular
contributor to documentary projects for the “La 2” cannel for the Televisión
Española (Spanish Television), a professor of documentary filmmaking at the
ESCAC film school. She is currently an independent documentary filmmaker as
well as a professor of documentary filmmaking at the University of Antioquia
(Colombia).
MOTIVATION Commented [SH4]: PERSONAL MOTIVATION (¿)

I grew up deeply affected by the violence which ravaged Medellín during my

teenage years. I voluntarily decided to escape all of this, and for the next ten
years, I lived as an immigrant in Spain. I lived in the El Rabal neighborhood in
Barcelona, surrounded by immigrants. In the year 2004, I visited the city of Vic. I
instantly realized that this place was the synthesis of the European drama.
Therefore, I decided to turn the camera onto the city’s immigrant population.

I filmed more than one hundred “video messages” for the immigrants’ friends and
relatives, and sent VHS copies to all of them. These video messages constituted
a unique gesture among the immigrants and their families, at a time in which the
only possible communication medium was the written letter.

Each person speaks to the camera as if he were actually speaking to the

message’s recipient. They speak in their native tongue, expressing the way they
feel about their displacement, talking about the things they missed from their
homelands. These filmed messages are pure emotion: their faces, the cadence
of their language, their silences, genuinely reveal the experience of being
uprooted.

After my return to Colombia, these messages came back to my thoughts once

and again. The dimensions which the humanitarian drama of European
immigration reach have motivated me to artistically express my feelings about
this topic.
DISCTINCTIVE CONTEXTUAL ELEMENTS

In Vic, blanketed by fog, one can smell an intense fragrance of pork, coming from
the slaughterhouses that dot its outskirts. This industry requires cheap labor,
which is why the city is a popular destination for immigrants looking for work. In
just a few years, Vic’s immigrant population has grown to over 30%: This makes
it a paradigm of the phenomenon of a principally Islamic wave of immigration
which Spain and Europe has undergone.

As well as the filmed messages, I focused on aspects which symbolize the

relationship between Vic and its immigrant population:

The slaughterhouse

For a Muslim immigrant, pork is despicable and impure. Thus, to slaughter pigs,
to eat pork, or to live in a country for which pork has such culinary significance,
represents an immense shock, both in terms of culture as well as religion.

Thus, the slaughterhouse represents a symbolic space in which death, and the
systematic sacrifice of living creatures is an everyday event, and a setting where
there is no place for the executioners’ feelings. And here, the executioners are
mainly Muslim immigrants, who come to Vic in order to escape hunger and
violence.

The spilled pigs’ blood flows before the eyes of those who have witnessed the
blood of their loved ones flow past. They come here fleeing a bloody past and
paradoxically, earn their living as executioners.

When I again look at the series of images of the slaughtered pigs, I think of wars
in the third world, of the blood spilled by my people, that blood which serves as a
moral justification to spill others’ blood. The blood spilled in the past justifies the
blood spilled in the present. A chain of retaliations and vengeance which does
not seem to have neither a past nor a future, but only a circular, perpetual
present.

The fog

The fog lies on Vic’s plains. It is a unique weather condition which identifies and
characterizes the city: When the sunlight hides behind the fog, forms are blurred,
contours are hidden, volumes are flattened and the vibrancy of the colors are
dulled. In the same way, our thoughts and perceptions of the city become
ambiguous and mysterious, veiled by an obscuring shadows.

The “castellers” (human castles)

This is one of the traditions which best represents and symbolizes Catalan
identity. They are authentic human towers and a true symbol of unity: Every
person needs each other in order to form the castle. Through the arrival of these
immigrants, one identical tradition has been found. This multicultural initiative has
resulted in Indians and Catalans coming together to form one human castle. In
this way, they symbolically construct a viable utopia of a new society.

Audiovisual treatment:

“Voces distantes” (“Distant Voices”) is a 40-minute documentary which,

through a poetic, artistic narrative, seeks to affect the spectator, confronting him
with an emotional and sensorial experience which will allow an empathetic
identification with a group of Muslim immigrants who live in the city of Vic.

The audiovisual treatment is based on the nature of every immigrant’s experience:

a divided life. The screen is divided into two symmetrical halves with independent Commented [SH5]: Queda claro que es partida en dos?
shots and sequences. The relation between the two halves will be poetic and (Escindida…)
evocative, and not at all illustrative. The audio, the sound mix, will present random
relationships between the visual context and the voices of the messages. In this
way, then, the sound will constitute the third dimension of the image, expanding
the spectator’s multiple interpretation. He will not be made to process the various
stimuli in a logical and instantaneous way, but will be able to accumulate and
postpone sensory impressions through an equally sustained attention. Thus, the
perception of meaning is delayed from the beginning.

Everything consists of not understanding things immediately. Perception must be

kept open to all of the possible connections and links among the images,
according to each spectator’s particular experiences.

The editing process aims to generate an openended sensorial experience, one Commented [SH6]: Oponed ¿?
which does not appeal to the spectator’s sense of logic, but to awakening his or
her sensitivity through encountering the immigrants’ intimacy as they speak to their
loved ones from afar, from a city blanketed in fog, full of slaughtered pigs and of
both open- and closedminded Catalan people.

Fragments of the filmed messages add upon each other in a canon of voices,
which, together, bring us closer to the experience of what it is to be an immigrant,
far away from home: their anxiety, fear, as well as their dreams. This choir of
voices immerses the spectator in an emotional journey through a fog-covered city
and through the crudeness of a pig slaughterhouse, to finally take him to the
construction of a human castle erected by Indian and Catalan people, as a
metaphor for the utopia of multicultural societies coexisting in solidarity.

The ancient tradition of human castles which brings together immigrants and
Catalan natives emerges as a new wind which disperses the thick fog, letting the
sun shine in.