For me, Canarian identity ranges from a song by Quevedo to the latest film by Armando Ravelo.
Perhaps some intellectuals will be shocked, and perhaps the younger ones will applaud that idea.
The good thing is that the common point between mature intellectuals and the youngest is once again the important one: the feeling of Canarian identity and its diverse understanding.
The love for a land that the Greeks already called the Garden of the Hesperides because of how paradisiacal and lost it was... paradise of Guanches and exile of rebellious anti-imperialists.
Once Upon a Time in the Canary Islands is the calm sea, but also the rough one.
The portrait of going from side B to side A of the world in a small boat. Perhaps utopian due to the lack of realism, but without a doubt, hopeful.
Living on side B of a polluted planet, not only by plastic, but by a profound lack of humanity, is the worst of luck.
I don't know at what point we decided to have a divine authority to take out a ruler and divide the world among ourselves. To decide who steps on the earth and who doesn't. We believe we have impunity to decide something as complex as identity and belonging just for having seen the first light in a certain place.
Pure luck or pure misfortune!
As if the streets had a passport to walk. And the homeland was bread.
The infernos are the seas, but they are also the lands that were paradises in other times.
Because hell doesn't go away, it just changes place.
Maybe tomorrow hell will be under your feet, under our feet. As it already was in the Canary Islands when our people had to pack their bags... Cuba, Venezuela, Uruguay...
Because you have to flee from hells.
It is human to flee.
You would, I would, and even the neighbor who votes for VOX would. He would perhaps be the first to get on the boat.
And it is legitimate.
We are alive and we want to live.
Not survive.
Although then all the theories about paradise crumble...one finds life in the eyes of little Nola in Africa.
And understands that paradise is the same as mental constructions and walls.
However, I am sure of something:
paradise will be full of children free from everything that is not laughing, like Nola.
A place in the world to take refuge with your eyes closed? Nola's eyes. Because they are more alive than the entire "First World".
All of the Canary Islands should see "Once upon a time" to understand that another story is possible instead of the story we have been told.
It invites us to imitate solidarity in the streets. It manages to connect us with the drama, but above all...something crucial, it manages to remove the enumeration from migration. And eradicate the "illegal" from the human.
Congratulations to the team, especially its director Armando Ravelo
The light of his brilliance betrays what he keeps in his head and what his work reflects is the kindness of a good human being. And that is the greatest of successes.
