Remember My Name

“When I was 13 years old, my mother started to work at the First Reception Centre in Hortaleza, one of the biggest ones in Madrid. It had been only a year since my father had died, and my mother worked long hours. When she was on duty, she slept at the centre. Some weekends I went to visit her and I met some of the girls who lived in the centre. I felt comfortable with them, more so than with some of the girls at my school. There was something in their way of being in the world, in their longings, that appealed to me. Later, I understood that it was the feeling of growing up with something missing.

Five years ago, I travelled to Melilla to shoot a video clip. The protagonists were the dancers of NANA, a project created by Natalia Diaz and Navid Mohammed that promotes emotional, intellectual, social and ethical development through art with boys and girls living in juvenile centres in Melilla. Assia, one of the dancers, who was 14 years old at the time, grabbed my arm during a break in the filming and asked me to go for a walk together. After a while, she asked me very softly: ‘Elena, do you think you can trust people even if they are not your family?’ Her question took me straight back to my adolescence, years I remember with great confusion, always making up films to escape from a reality I didn’t like. I said yes with all my strength and told her that it had helped me a lot to accept that there are many ways to grow and build yourself up, and that, although it hurts, it also makes you stronger. I also said that friendships and creating bonds of trust were fundamental.

After a few minutes, we resumed filming. The music started to play, and Assia, together with her companions, began to dance following the steps set by Natalia’s choreography. The tension in Assia’s body and face disappeared, as if invisible threads had been loosened. The group moved to the same beat, as one body. I understood that the dance classes were much more than an extracurricular subject: dancing to escape the hostile reality with which Melilla, Spain and Europe had received them.

When we said goodbye after the filming of the video clip, I deeply felt that it was not the end of a project, but the beginning of a much bigger one. Although the geopolitical context of Melilla is fundamental in the film, what really made me throw myself into accompanying Assia, Hamza, Mouad, and the rest of the protagonists was the visceral need to explore a much more universal feeling: the importance of growing up accompanied and supported to develop oneself free from the emptiness caused by absence. Not growing up in a nuclear family does not mean that you are incomplete, because a family can have different forms, names and even languages.

Remember My Name wants to get closer to Hamza, Assia, Mounia, Mouad and the other protagonists during the four years we have shared together to laugh, suffer, cry, get excited and grow with them. To accompany the physical and psychological transformation of living between two worlds in constant tension, with the weight of the migratory mission on their shoulders and an absolutely unfair stigma embodied in the acronym MENA (unaccompanied migrant minor). Sharing the contained loneliness and the constant dream of returning to a family that is always present in their minds, but which they cannot see, always in that out-of-field on the other side of the fence that delineates the border between Morocco and Spain, between Africa and Europe.

Remember My Name is also a political film, in which the 13 square kilometres of Melilla, surrounded by the omnipresent fence and the Mediterranean Sea, become the game board on which the protagonists have the time to fulfill their mission: to learn a language, study, train and get a job to regulate their documentation before they turn 18 and are forced to start from scratch and alone, again.

I firmly believe that it is necessary and urgent to change the narrative and the hate speeches that have been nurtured in recent years around unaccompanied minors, even generating episodes of violence and outbursts of political parties that try to blame minors who are not and do not function as a group, but are people with names and surnames. Focusing the problem on a system that generates such unequal dynamics on each side of a fence that aims to separate Africa from Spain in the north of the African continent.”

– Elena Molina, Director