Why shouldn’t we talk about them?

The interesting side in our job is that hardly anything can be planned… there’s always the “X Factor”... that could be called also “human factor”… each person reacts differently to the same situation and nothing can be taken for granted.
For the last interview, we had two options (in case everything went good we would have had 5 interviews… but we knew there are always “surprises”…)

… a “mixed” couple … a friend of us from Senegal (one of the first persons we met at our arrival) and his beautiful wife from the South of Italy… kind and friendly the way only these people from the South can be, at the beginning they accepted to participate… but then… they vanished. We recognized in their eyes the willingness not to offend us and at the same time the need of discretion about their life. We did not insist.

…. The second change was a 40 y.o. businessman from Morocco, enthusiastic of our project, who gave us the possibility to shoot for a whole night into his pub and involved an old friend of his in a conversation in the short pauses during the working time. Noise, voices, music, the impossibility to shoot steadily made this interview very much different from the others. But his great energy convinced us to make an attempt. After 2 hours of shooting, when the interview was over and the video camera again inside the bag, the surprise.
His friend, a schoolteacher from Sardinia, refused to sign the releasing.
“I am intolerant to documents to be signed !” she told to my astonished face “I’ll sign it when the film will be done… in this way I can better follow the project”
“?????” I was dumb with amazement.
We cannot work on images if we are not sure we can use them! We have no choice: we won’t use tonight images.
Sometimes I think people do not grasp the work existing behind the editing of a whatsoever film…
After a while, we found out that with the expression “to better follow the project” she intended to say that such kind of stories do not represent the proper description of immigration: we should denounce and speak out against the way immigrants are treated in our country.

We are not of the same mind.

Stories of ostracism and indifference fulfill our newspapers and our broadcast television: immigrants are seen as people apart, that should be blamed or have mercy upon them.

Nadouba asks no mercy. Eva is fully integrated. Reza is even popular in via del Pratello. Why shouldn’t we talk about them?