La frontera desbordada: colaboración, cine y autonomía en el contexto de las luchas por la libertad de movimiento

Abstract

The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to show how different collaborative film practices have been used to support subjects and struggles for freedom of movement in a border context. This is done mainly by paying attention to how the collaborative has been inserted in the communication process, at different levels: the elaboration of film proposals, the audiovisual creation, the communication channel created through the border or the reception of these works. The thesis has a hermeneutic theoretical reflection character applied to the processes of creation of the filmic works carried out between 2017 and 2022 by the collective La Barraca Transfronteriza, a collective of which the author is a member. In relation to the context, work has been carried out, both at the level of filmic creation by the collective and in scope by this thesis, in the framework of the externalization of European borders in Morocco, as well as in the land border with Ceuta. As a theoretical framework, different filmmakers and film movements that, in the context of the decolonization of Third World countries, have used cinema as a weapon for the radical creation of a new humanity that emerged against the First and Second World in the Cold War period, and the different ways in which these filmmakers understood the processes of collaboration for this purpose, are considered. In addition, the different current theoretical approaches that understand migration as a social movement granting agency and political autonomy to the subjects in the struggle for freedom of movement are discussed. The thesis groups in its results the different film genres approached by the collective under three specific objectives. First, through the discursive analysis of the filmed interviews, we propose to show how migrant subjects are political actors with autonomy within a specific context of border control. Secondly, it considers at what types of cross-border communication spaces have been opened through the proposed collaborative creation processes, generating communication channels through the creation of works framed within the epistolary modes in film culture. Finally, we reflect on how fiction cinema, through the collaborative, has been able to show a poetics of a borderscape, taking space as the main subject, under a symbolic quality, expressed through characters and plots emerged in collective creation processes.