Walls are meant to keep people apart, but a group of international filmmakers hopes to use them to bring communities together.
The Connected Walls project, which launches Thursday in Tucson, focuses on everyday life along the U.S.-Mexico border and between Spain and Morocco. Four documentarians, one on each side of their respective borders, will work in two teams to produce five-minute videos.
Over the next two months, audiences will have the chance to vote on which topics the filmmakers tackle next, with a new short documentary being premiered every 10 days on the project’s website.
Valeria Fernández, who will be working on the U.S. side, said what drew her to the project was the chance to explore the similarities of border walls across the world.
“The proliferation of walls, the focus on enforcement and the militarization of the borderlands is not something unique to the United States,” she said. “It’s happening across the world and that’s had an impact on the way we perceive each other as nations and the way people coexist in communities.”
Fernández, who has been working as a journalist in Arizona for the last 11 years, is teamed up with Fidel Enríquez, a Mexico City documentarian.
He said the combination of his fresh perspective and Fernández’s experience covering the region are a good match.
“The wall to me seems naturally absurd. The hills keep going on the other side; the plants keep growing on the other side. Nogales is really one city divided by a wall,” Enríquez said.
Although Connected Walls is an international production, the border along Arizona was the inspiration for the project, said creator Sébastien Wielemans.
A few years ago, the Belgian filmmaker was in Arivaca working on a documentary and said he was surprised to discover how the wall created prejudices between the separated communities.
“If you have a wall in front of you, it doesn’t give you the will to go behind it. So you start to imagine stuff happening behind and that’s where prejudices and assumptions come from,” Wielemans said.
The filmmakers said they are not taking an activist position on border walls but instead want to showcase the human stories surrounding them, both in the United States and Europe.
“This is not a project about immigration. This is much bigger than that. It’s really about the big picture. It’s about people,” Fernández said.
She added that viewers would benefit from looking away from their own borders and seeing how other communities are dealing with similar issues.
“That’s when you can have that ‘aha moment’ of discovery and empathy,” she said. “By looking at something happening somewhere else, you see yourself in it.”
An important part of the project is the interactive website, which along with allowing viewers to vote on topics and showcasing the videos produced, it also connects users to others around the world.
Through the Internet, the filmmakers said, Connected Walls seeks to not only go beyond physical borders but to try and overcome other kinds of walls.
“We’re looking to connect more as human beings,” Enríquez said. “If we do this, I believe it helps mediate any type of conflict, from the personal level to disputes between countries.”
