Karim is an Algerian migrant man selling sex as SAMIRA at night in Marseille. He left Algeria as a young man as her breasts started developing as a result of taking hormones and was granted asylum in France as a transgender woman. Twenty years later, as his father is dying and he is about to become the head of the family Samira surgically removes her breasts and marries a woman in order to get a new passport allowing him to return to Algeria to assume his new role.
SAMIRA (Emborders 1) is the first of Emborders’ 4 installation/movies. It is being produced by IMeRA in co-operation with SATIS (Departement Sciences Arts et Techniques de l’image et du Son of the Aix-Marseille University). The Emborders filmmaking/research project questions the effectiveness and scope of sexual humanitarian initiatives protecting, controlling and deporting migrants working in the sex industry and sexual minority asylum seekers. In order to get their rights recognised and avoid deportation migrants targeted by sexual humanitarianism reassemble their bodies and perform their subjectivities according to standardised victimhood, vulnerability and gender/sex scripts. In the process only a minority of migrants targeted by anti-trafficking interventions and applying for asylum obtain protection, refugee status and the associated rights. The vast majority are treated as collateral damage and become either irregularly resident in immigration countries or forcefully deported against their will and in often dangerous circumstances to their countries of origin.
Emborders will produce 4 ethno-fictional 20 min installations, which will also be edited in the form of a one-screen movie, on the life and migration trajectories of sexual minority migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Marseille, Paris and London.
The first installation SAMIRA will be part of the Anti-Atlas of Borders exhibition to be showcased at the Museum of Tapestries in Aix en Provence and at La Campagnie in Marseille from October 2103 to March 2014).
The Anti-Atlas is the main outcome of the Project on the ‘Transformations of Border in the 21st Century’, which is based at IMeRA and co-ordinated by Cedric Parizot and curated by Isabelle Arvers.