DISTRICT ZERO

What’s hidden inside the smartphone of a refugee? It contains clues to a refugee’s memories, past, identity and some contacts from the world he had to flee from. This film narrates the daily life of a tiny mobile phone shop in one of the largest refugee camps in the world.

PABLO IRABURU

 

Co-director and executive producer. Pablo Iraburu is the founder and CEO of Arena Comunicación Audiovisual. He has devoted over 20 years to the production of documentaries. This has led him to film in places such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, USA, Paraguay, Morocco, Chad, Madagascar, Malawi, Ivory Coast, India, Thailand, China and all over the European Community, from Scotland to Romania. His first full-length film as a producer, codirector and co-scriptwriter was “Nömadak TX”, filmed in Lapland, India, Mongolia and Northern Africa. A winner in San Sebastián, the film had a long international tour. His second film, “Pura Vida/The Ridge”, filmed in ten different countries also premiered and won a prize in San Sebastián and is currently being internationally distributed. Apart from his documentary maker facet, Iraburu produces audiovisual works for different museums -such as the National Archaeology Museum-, television programs –such us “Challenge 14+1”, which chronicled Edurne Pasabán’s expedition to Everest- and for NGOs and non-profit making entities such as Action Aid, Manos Unidas, Medicus Mundi, United Nations or the Spanish International Cooperation Agency. He is a Documentary lecturer in the University of Navarra.

 

 

JORGE FERNÁNDEZ MAYORAL

 

Film maker and editor, Jorge Fernández Mayoral has been dedicated to audiovisual realization for nine years. He worked as chief technical officer at Arena Communication from 2004 to 2011, and since then he collaborates with the company and other audiovisual production as a freelance filmmaker specialized in documentary film. Among his most notable projects include the documentary "Nömadak Tx" and the documentary "To Shoot an Elephant", "What about Columbus," "Piztera" and "They took everything." He recently worked as deputy director and film maker in television programs "Yasuni, jungle genocide" and "Amazon Clandestino" for the chain Discovery Max. His television experience is completed with the "Challenge 14 + 1" program, filmed on Everest, in which he was a cameraman.

 

 

PABLO TOSCO

 

Photojournalist and film maker, since 2004 Pablo Tosco documents for Oxfam Intermón cooperation, development and humanitarian aid projects in Africa, Latin America and Asia. He is responsible for covering educational and peace building projects in Angola, life in Sudanese refugees camps in Chad, work of the peasant associations of Morocco, the IDP settlements in Central African Republic and South Sudan, victims of Haiti and Nepal earthquakes, the food crisis in Ethiopia, Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and recently, the Syrian conflict, which he published a book in 2014 called "Syria: withered spring" with other photojournalists. He has published stories in photographic and audiovisual media like El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, BBC, TVE, Al Jazeera, The Guardian and Washington Post, among others. As film maker, the following documentary shorts, in which he has worked as a scriptwriter and director of photography, stand out: "Footprints are not silent" (Colombia), "Postcards from the other side of the war" (South Sudan), and "Felipe Manterola a rural photographer "(Bizkaia).

• Belfast Film Festival, UK 2016 
• Movies that Matter Festival, Netherlands 2016 
• Festival Internacional de cine en Guadalajara, México 2016 
• Vittoria FF | Best documentary award, Canada 2015 
• Karama Film Festival, Jordan 2015 
• San Sebastián International Film Festival, Spain 2015 
• Expo Milano, Italy 2015

It has been years since we have been willing to discuss the issue of refugees. We have travelled to visit their world, which is never spoken about: a world of chaos, uprooting and hopelessness. It is a kind of a non-world, invisible to us but mighty, terrible and growing. This issue of invisible and forgotten refugees troubled us and we wanted to do something about it but we just didn’t know how.

 

Then came the opportunity to do something that would work within the project "EUsaveLIVES - You save lives," led by the European Commission and Oxfam,. Together with them we decided to create something wonderful that would help to show as many people as possible, across the world, what it is to be a refugee. That's when we took a very risky and creative decision: the media speak of 59.5 million refugees and displaced persons: Let’s just talk about one. And so we began to look for someone special - and we found Maamun. Maamun lives in one of the largest refugee camp in the world. We discovered that his business -repairing phones, printing photos- had much to do with his sense of identity and that was what we wanted to talk about in the film. A refugee who has to flee would traditionally carry with him the essentials of his home: a few pots, clothes, some object of value. Today, anywhere in the world, a refugee carries with him his mobile phone - because inside this are his contacts, his memories, his link to the world from where he is being displaced. Maamun gave us the opportunity to talk to him about the essence of being a refugee and their identity. And in doing so, he allows us to address the audience, ask questions, and challenge them about their own identity.

 

To make this film has been an intense and fascinating experience. The shooting could be challenging and there were different moments ranging from times of pain to times of laughter and positive engagement. This is a collaborative film, directed by three different people, while production has involved people from half a dozen countries. Throughout the process many different languages have been spoken and we are proposing the distribution of the film to be global. At the end of the day, after diving into the identity of Maamun, portraying the identity of refugees who live with him, we discovered that this identity is not unlike our own. We could all be refugees if things in our life were different. This non-world that we never speak about is much closer to us than we think.

Let IT dok! 2016