a displacement of akira kurosawa's short movie “sunshine through the rain” as a personal interpretation by luis ortiz.

synopsis:

Which language is ours? Which culture, which place, which time? Which feelings own ourselves, which ones are universal? What is the influence of the politics, the economy, the nation and the nationality on our destiny?

A reenactment of a visa "drama", an appropriation of a japanese movie, a try to talk a critical language above the good and bad clichés of foreignness, a critical language above the dominant economies of movie-making.

concept:

The film is an appropriation of a short film by Kurosawa part of the episode film Dreams (1990), from whom the sound and the texts are keep from the original and the images are changed, so at the same time is also a re-enactment. Based on real circumstances, and played by myself, this film reflects my feelings to be an unwanted person in a wealthy society, a migrant without a visa, but with the desire of being part of that society. The second part, though, shows legal evidence against me that want to confront the viewer, like the evidence in a legal trial. Have I committed a criminal offense? Or are these legal problems secondary results of the limited residence rights? Am I a criminal foreigner? “Ein krimineller Ausländer?”

The aesthetic and economic methods of this film are precarious because it is a film about the precariousness. Migrants and foreigners experience this precariousness by being confronted with problems of dependency and lack of skills for the life in Europe, to say it in other way, a lack of privilege in contrast to the european population. But we are also confronted with a systematic discrimination, like all that are unwilling or unable to cope with the demands of late capitalism in the global North.

The original Film from Kurosawa, is based in his own memories about some dreams that impressed him at most in different ages of his life. So the original film has some autobiographical elements, elements that I now retake to tell a story about me. On the other side is like the title says a displacement, what means I take it from its historical, geographical and linguistic context to other one, likely a metaphor for migration. Even, when the film is transported from that high-end, professional and expansive production context to the precarious production context is that a form of displacement.

In my opinion, one should be very aware that the imaginary, the idea of life that everyone in the world nowadays desires, has been shaped by an image of the harmonic and economical prosperous global North and who doesn't belong to it is less worth for the society. Using Fanon's words he/she is living in a zone of not-being and the biopower of the state is willing to make that clear. Pierre Bourdieu wrote about the concept of Symbolic Violence as an instrument of the society that suppresses the individual and how this oppression is internalized and reproduced by the oppressed groups, some similar line of thoughts can be found by Antonio Gramsci and, in particular in questions of migration, by Frantz Fanon. Thus, these instruments of symbolic violence are accepted and reproduced in the desire of men and women, and this gap between their life and an ideal of “a better life” become an unspeakable in the Lacanian sense of the word.