Alexandra D’Onofrio: La vita che non CIE. Three short films on Italian identification and expulsion centres

Mit drei Kurzfilmen erzählt Regisseurin Alexandra D’Onofrio Geschichten von Abschiebehäftlingen und ihren Angehörigen – Geschichten, die die Knastmauern überwinden.

• Love in the time of Frontier (20 minutes)
• Luck will save me (18 minutes)
• Daddy’s not coming back (15 minutes)

A five year old child who keeps on asking his mother about his father’s whereabouts and why he is not coming back home. The hands of a young man in love which shake out of anger closed in a cage, moments before the riot. And the limbo condition of a man who as a former inmate looks after his friends who are still behind the bars, counting the days still missing until their release. These are the stories of Kabbour, Nizar and Abderrahim. Three names which tell the lives of those who lie behind the statistics of the expulsions machine.

In this manner, the director Alexandra D’Onofrio tries to turn over the aestethics of the borders. So that the figures of the Ministry of the Interior may become once again men and women in the flesh. With a story which goes beyond the Cie (identification and expulsion centre), with a past and a future, inside and outside the cage. And with a universal feeling, be it love, paternity or solitude, with which we all can identify in order to have the certainty that in 2012 travelling is not and cannot be a crime.

Direction and camera: Alexandra D’Onofrio
In collaboration with: Gabriele Del Grande
Editing: Antonio Augugliaro
Post production audio: Tommaso Barbaro (Redrum Murder)
Music: Dessoi Logoi
Produced by Fortress Europe with a contribution from Open Society Foundation

Alexandra D’Onofrio, director and anthropologist, was born in London from Greek mother and Italian father. She graduated in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She holds workshops of the theatre of the oppressed and has collaborated with the Italian language school Asnada in Milan. Before the “La vita che non CIE”, she produced the short film “Senso” (which received the Vita Award at the 2007 Milan filmMaker) and the photographic audio-documentary “Caught in between Darkness and Light” on the journey towards the United Kingdom of a group of refugees who left from Milan and got stuck at Calais. At present she is engaged in a doctoral research at the University of Manchester on visual anthropology and applied theatre on the imaginative worlds of the migrations. If you wish to contact her:

alexandra.donofrio [at] yahoo.it