Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to examine Munir Abbar´s “Paris sur Mer” (2007) as a case study in which the cinematic imagination of mobility from rural local to heterogeneous urban global geographies questions the politics and aesthetics of space representations which specific signifiers.

Paper long abstract:

As a native film-maker from Morocco living in Berlin, Munir Abbar is familiar with transnational connections that also characterize his works. In a road movie genre, visually mapping the filmic space with different geographies and altered landscapes, his short film is about Wilson, a young illegal immigrant from Benin, who has Paris as final destination in his mind. After an exhausting journey in the desert, he arrives in Tangier (Morocco), the space-in-between to other world, where he temporally resides, waiting for an opportunity to reach Paris, and where illusion and fantasy become a source of hope for not losing all his benchmarks. Paris in the film however remains an imaginary space created by Wilson as a utopian city with all possible opportunities, but which he describes in the narrated letter to his parents as the real space where he lives. The physical displacement from the rural to urban confronts Wilson´s imagination with the reality, and enables paradoxally unexpected narratives.

The paper aims to examine the short film as a case study in which the cinematic imagination of the mobility from rural local to heterogeneous urban global geographies questions the politics and aesthetics of space representations which specific socio-economic and cultural signifiers.