15/11/2023 - Spanish filmmaker Elena Molina takes a human approach to the life stories of a group of migrant minors in a documentary

A group of children and teenagers (or both at the same time) are about to go on stage to perform a musical in which they will be the stars. These same children and adolescents cross the Melilla fence from Morocco. These moments open Remember My Name, the latest feature-length documentary from Elena Molina, premiered at the last Malaga Festival - where it won the Silver Biznaga Audience Award - and which, after screening at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (as part of its special sessions), is now being screened at L’Alternativa – Barcelona Independent Film Festival.

The documentary chronicles the daily reality of a group of migrant minors in Melilla over five years. Ihsen is placed in a shelter run by nuns for unaccompanied girls, where Asia, Mounia and Nuhaila also live. Hamza will soon turn 18 and will have to leave the boys' home where he lives. All of them arrived in the city alone, but there they have also found another kind of family: the dance company NANA, with which they have been selected to take part in the Got Talent TV show. From there, the film tells the stories of the teenage years of this group of minors and their confrontation with adulthood when they turn 18, the clash between the worlds in which they live, the harshness and uncertainty of the future they will have to face, the relationships between them and the importance of these ties in their sentimental education.

All this is narrated with naturalness, simplicity and sensitivity, in a realistic way, from the point of view of a friendly camera that joins the group of teenagers to reflect their realities from their perspective, getting close to them, accompanying them in their daily lives and listening to them in their conversations, from dance rehearsals to playing sports, going to the beach or to the hairdresser. Avoiding the easy sentimentality that could be given to this type of stories, with humanity, far from stereotypes and easy judgements (at no time are the families of the minors blamed or stigmatised), the documentary delves into the intimacy of its protagonists, their emotional world, their worries, their concerns, their anxieties, their aspirations, their dreams, what they are now, how they have got there, and what they would like to be tomorrow, how they see themselves in the future. It is also interesting how dance is used to play with the metaphor at the start of the film, with the parallel between entering the stage and adult life upon coming of age, and, in this way, to talk about the gulfs they face in different ways: when they arrive alone in an unknown place after crossing the fence, the day they have to leave the centre and find a life outside, and the nerves before starting a show full of people and cameras.

Remember My Name is not a film about unaccompanied minors (the so-called "menas"), but about the people behind this collective. Through the possibilities provided by a documentary, from an intimate point of view, with a human approach to the characters and their life stories, Elena Molina manages to give them a presence (not a voice, they already have one), to show who they are, that each of them has a name, that they are someone beyond the commonplace in which they are classified.

Remember My Name is produced by the Spanish company Boogaloo Films and the French company Les Films d’Ici.

(Translated from Spanish)