400 días sin luz

Synopsis

400 días sin luz (400 days without electricity) is the history and map of a neighbourhood. It is also the story of Wafa and her family who live there surrounded by many other families. This story will be a map of all the people who live and have lived in La Cañada, because this place contains years of dreams, kitchen gardens and birds. A neighbourhood is a place to live in, to plant a cherry tree that bears fruit and breath, a place to weave door-to-door intimacies, season after season.

One day they are left without one of the fundamental rights to lead a dignified life: electricity. From that moment on, they will stop living and a fight for survival will begin. That fight will not be new, they have been demonstrating for years who they are. They have spent years weaving home, dream and promised land with the threat of losing everything. Wafa is a teenager who dreams of studying medicine, she has not asked to be born in that place and she fights to continue with her life despite all the difficulties. In Cañada they know that when you have to fight to defend hope, promise and dignity, you lose time in life. How to live and defend life without losing it? How to defend that place that we call shelter? How can you ensure that your children do not lose their warmth, joy and tenderness? We have to keep going. We must defend life and the cherry tree in the courtyard. How do we do it without electricity?

Director’s note

Neighbourhood: “Part of a city that contains a spontaneous social grouping and that has a distinctive physical, social, economic or ethnic character by which it is identified”.

We first arrived in Cañada Real in January 2021. We had just come out of a historic snowfall and came loaded with press headlines and a handful of ideas. That day all we did was walk. I remember it was like going back to my childhood village, to my grandparents’ house, to home. Since then, 18 months have passed and countless meetings have taken place. Since then, every time I go back, I also return to the feeling of that first day.

Cañada Real – which emerged in the 1950s along 14 kilometres of an old cattle route – is described as “the largest illegal settlement in Europe” but families of three generations now live together there. Around 8,000 people of 17 nationalities, with 2,800 minors. After decades of legal battles (and an endless journey of protests, reports, power outages or regional pacts), its residents have learned to organise themselves, defend their rights and claim their identity. Today, its residents continue to fight for a common goal: the will to stay, to protect that home.

What is a neighbourhood? What rules define its geographical and life map? How to ensure that it remains? This fiction is the sum of many anonymous faces that make up a reality that is as devastating as it is everyday. A choral story told by ten performers who give voice to more than twenty characters from three generations, three families, three cultures. The history of a neighbourhood that strives to maintain its dignity, like so many other neighbourhoods in any other big city.

Raquel Alarcón