Short experimental text on practice

Questioning my idea of working with migrant children has been an endless quest for me. There are too many worries, implications, risks of portraying their lives, and it takes me long discussions with myself and others in order to feel at peace with my decisions. However, there is one question that persists: how can I help these children to represent the violence they have lived?

When I began my project, I met Angel, and he became the protagonist right away. He surprised people with his inventiveness, he could lighten up spaces with his spontaneous rap bits and he was very vocal about the violence he lived through in his journey. Other children had proposed making a horror movie with me, and Angel got into it right away as it was his favorite genre. We shot many hours of non-structured conversations planning the film, in which my aim was to actively listen to him, and this is how I compiled so many heartbreaking memories of his life, the kind that could make anyone cry. I had the perfect character for the story, and I felt horrible for having found him.

And then, comes the questions: how similar (or not) are horror films to migration stories? Who are the ghosts in these stories? Why did it feel right that migrant children decided to do a horror film and not a normal happy ending movie?

But these are questions I am making disregarding the kid I’m working with, the one confiding me with a life of pain. Why did I look for this? Why do I need to make people characters for my projects? And now that Angel has shared with me these important parts of his life, how will I share them without exploiting his trauma?

I told Angel that I was making a film sharing how we were making a horror movie together and that I would use the voice recordings to remember all the things I learned from him. He told me it was fine as long as he could not be identified. He left before we could finish.

I don't even know if I’m asking the right questions, or if I should worry about being right or wrong. I didn’t go to art school until now, so I guess they teach people how to question their work properly there. I hope they do. I hope I get to.