Evaporating Borders
A film essay in five parts, Evaporating Borders offers a series of vignettes, poetically guided by the filmmaker’s curious eye and personal reflections. Through the people she encounters along the way, the film dissects the experience of asylum seekers in Cyprus: A PLO activist and exile from Iraq is denied asylum within 15 minutes; neo-nazi fundamentalists roam the streets in an attack on Muslim migrants; activists and academics organize an antifascist rally and clash with the neo-nazis; 195 migrants drown in the Mediterranean.
Originally from Yugoslavia and an immigrant to Cyprus, Iva Radivojevic investigates the effects of large-scale immigration on the sense of national identity in one of the easiest ports of entry into Fortress Europe. Poetically photographed and rendered, the film passionately weaves the themes of migration, tolerance, identity and belonging.
Originally from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists except in books and films, the family of Iva Radivojevic immigrated to Cyprus to escape political unrest. Raised in Cyprus, I’m approaching the film as a personal exploration of what it means to have a hybrid existence in which one is always searching for an identity.
The title “Evaporating Borders” corresponds to the idea that the erosion of boundaries and borders (both physical and metaphoric) defamiliarize the narratives of selfhood through which identities take shape and reproduce themselves. The flow of populations, commodities and information is associated with loss of traditions, memories and histories. This poses a threat to national identity and translates to discrimination, prejudice, and intolerance. What is apparent in Cyprus is emblematic of hierarchical racial structures around the world, looking to cultures and peoples outside Western borders from a position of superiority.
The art collective XORKO presents the movie in Nicosia within the festival ‘Producing localities: Cultural Endeavours, towards a Cypriot paradigm’
Screening on Saturday January 3, 7:30 at ARTos Cultural and Research Foundation, Agion Omologiton 64, 1080 Nicosia, Cyprus