Alberto Arce
2009.
Spain.
vo Spanish.
80’
Alberto Arce films documentaries: In 2004, Nablus la ciudad fantasma, in 2005 Internacionales en Palestina and El ghetto de Qalquilia, in 2007 Mesalla, pacifistas en Irak and in 2009 Erased: Wiped Off the Map. “... afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it...” George Orwell started out writing stories about killing an elephant in Asia. He ended up alternating between Mauser and pen in a fertile partnership. Walking Barcelona. Palestinians with a trunk, elephantiasic in their deformity. All of them terrorists whose lives have no value except as statistics choreographed in terms of the number and rate of their extermination. Without soiling the style pages. Decades later, Asia returns to Barcelona. Honest citizens of the West, waiting for better times to give up the pen, and the camera, wanting to take up the Mauser used by somebody who knew what it meant to shoot an elephant. Meanwhile, between increasingly sterile hunting expeditions, ammunition. Urgent, insomniac, dirty, shuddering images. 21 days counting bodies. Tell the world, bodies that have died, once again, for no other reason than the reassertion of power and colonial domination.