Meet the winners of the MAX Diversity Film Festival: Christin Schuchardt, director of “Barcelona a welcoming city”.
During the summer and autumn of 2021, the MAX Diversity Film Festival took place, a competition to create more spaces, both online and physical, to promote encounters among native-born citizens and newcomers to interact, share experiences and have joint debates. After 477 films submission from 82 countries were received, a selection of finalists by 10 international jurors, and a public voting procedure, on November 5th, during the MAX DFF Award ceremony have announced the winners of the Festival! Learn more about it here.
Today meet Christin Schuchardt, director of “Barcelona a welcoming city” winner of the Amateur Long Films category!
Christin Schuchardt, studied Cultural Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Göttingen, where she produced her first short film “Iduna-Komplex” (2016) and discovered her passion for filmmaking and non-fictional storytelling, which she deepened during her Masters in Visual Anthropology. In the last two and a half years, she focused on the production of her first documentary “Barcelona – A Welcoming City” (2021).
“Barcelona Ciudad de Acogida” is an ethnographic documentary which, due to one-year-and-half anthropological research with a collaborative approach, gives a deep insight into the everyday life, functioning and networking of diverse migrant communities in Barcelona and documents their persistent fight against the prevailing racist power relations.
The image of Barcelona is characterised by a cosmopolitan touristic life, long-term gentrification processes and progressive political perspectives, as for example for the welcoming of refugees and migrants. In order to find out to what extent the self-drawn image of Barcelona as a ‘Refugee City’ reaches the realities of the lives of the people affected by the European border regime, this ethnographic documentary focuses on the local political strategies which define and regulate the treatment of migrants. Further, it shows the alarming deficits and precarious living situations of those who have come in search of more humane living conditions and how, due to The Immigration Law, most of them spent years without the perspective of a right to stay or a work permit.
It consists in the presentation of the self-organised Union of Street Vendors of Barcelona, the human rights initiative ’Tanquem els CIEs’ which fights for the closure of Immigrant Detention Centres across Spain, the campaign against racial profiling ’Parad de Pararme’, the collective ’Frontera Sur’ which accompanies refugees after their arrival at Spain’s southern border and in their asylum process, and the self-organized migrant-and-refugee-protest ’Encierro Migrante’ which occupied a former Art School in Barcelona in order to reach out to the local politicians and fight for their human rights. These collectives have been involved in the research, shooting and editing process of this ethnographic documentary film, which aims to show the social struggles in the face of institutional racism from a BIPOC and migrant perspective.