yucolo.com :: MUSAC. Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León

27 September 2008 – 11 January 2009

Retorno a Hansala

Chus Gutiérrez came up with the idea for the video installation El retorno 1 while she was working on her film Poniente (2002), also on the issue of migration. The project kicked off in 2001, when she read an item in the newspaper about a flimsy migrants’ boat that had shipwrecked off the Spanish town of Rota. 37 migrants drowned, of whom 13 were from Hansala, the town that gave the film its name. The families were able to identify the bodies by their clothes and belongings, and the bodies were thus returned to Morocco. This was one of the first instances of illegal migrants’ corpses being returned from Spain. The video installation is a metaphorical journey: the journey home for the corpses’ clothes as remnants of shattered dreams.

El retorno 1 provided the basis for the plot of the feature film Retorno a Hansala, due to premiere in the coming autumn. The film tells the story of Martín (played by José Luis García Pérez), manager of a struggling funeral home, who finds a phone number on one of the boys who died on the Sraights. He gets in touch with Leila (played by Moroccan-born actress Farah Hamed), the dead boy’s sister and migrant worker, who will try to get her brother’s corpse sent home. Martín, spotting the business opportunity, travels home with her, keen on reaping the maximum profit from other families who might identify their loved ones through their clothes and belongings, only to come up against the harsh reality of the Moroccan Atlas region. Retorno a Hansala is the story of a man’s awakening and also of intercultural love and friendship, where two hardened and lonely survivors embark on a physical and moral journey in the course of which they overcome their fears and open up to each other and to the world.

Retorno a Hansala

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