CCA 4 Thursday 16th October
6.00-7.30 pm

The Life And Other Building Yards
Giuseppe Schettino
Italy 2007 / 37 Mins 14 Secs

This film will never answer all the questions which, since time immemorial, have arisen out of stereotypical attitudes to Gypsies. It does not set out to anthropologically investigate the culture of the Sinti people- a culture so similar to, yet so different from our own, both in terms of everyday life and ancient tradition: The Life And Other Building Yards, a short slice of Sinti life narrated almost as a "novella"; is a story about the conflict between generations and cultures, between fathers and sons’Ķ

La Ciudad Invisible (The Invisible City)
Lucia Asue Mbomio Rubio
Spain 2008 / 52 Mins

Flying stones, screams, rubber balls- riot police on one side, Maghrebians and Spaniards on the other. Abdul's house is demolished. He is a Moroccan mason living on the Canada Real Galiana, an ancient cattle track. 40 years of history are thrown into question.

Four decades of occupation of public land, 40,000 neighbours from four different communities: Spaniards, Muslims, Spanish Gypsies and Romanians. Luxury dwellings, shacks, pushers, drug addicts and over 10,000 children. No hospitals, no schools.

40 years after the arrival of the first settlers to the Canada Real Galiana, this is the scenario in a 16 km linear city located on the outskirts of Madrid: the largest illegal settlement in Europe.

The peaceful and lawless city of yesteryear has lately become "a settlement of injustice" which is daily haunted by two dramas: poverty on the one hand- its inhabitants forgotten by a society which intends to rehouse them close to an incinerator, and crime and drug dependency on the other- the direct consequences of such misery.

Through the testimonies of the inhabitants of this lawless city, La Ciudad Invisible tries to get closer to the everyday contrasting realities that coexist on this 16 km-long strip.