Hawaii Point is a project born in the Jungle of Calais in 2016. The Jungles was a huge refugee camp in France, in Calais, the closest city to England, from which is separated by the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point of the English Channel.
Since the late nineties thousands and thousands of migrants have settled here.
This camp has been cleaned out a few months after our filming ended. The migrants were living in sort of suspended time, waiting for that lucky day they could have crossed the Channel, despite all the risks.
Hawaii Point is focused on this concept of suspended time, through which the inhabitants of this kingdom take delight in experiencing their musical talent. And a colourful and bright narrator is the one who showed us how to look at that world properly. The Jungle of Calais has been under media’s attention for long time, especially in the last period in which it was defined an emergency. The inhabitants of the camp were addicted and annoyed by the presence of journalists who were coldly and constantly looking for interviews. The camera we were holding in our hands was a sort of symbol for them, an object we could have used to manipulate them as we wanted. This is why we’ve been staying there for 40 days, living in the camp and creating relationships. The idea of the Hawaii Point was born thanks to the humanitarian gifts that passed through our hands every day. One day many musical instruments arrived, as well as many large tarps that they used to build the barracks. The tarp created a place, so we decided to create a cheerful background so that people could spend time there playing, enjoying the present, despite always suspended in a “limbo”. In this context the video camera was reinterpreted by them as a game.
Thanks to this out‐of‐movie dynamics we started feeling the need to narrate.
Lucia Magnifico and Gabriele Macchi met while they were studying at Fine Arts Academy of Brera, in Milan. They lived temporarily in social housing, it was in this context that born their visual and documentary interests.
Now Lucia lives in Bologna, where she is studying anthropology and, at same moment, she is working to a project along the Balkan Route, on the border between Bosnia and Croatia. Gabriele lives in Milan where he works as a multimedia set-up for exhibitions.
The main work is Hawaii Point which won in 2017 “Talent Video Awards” (Careof) in Milan; it partecipated at Fid Campus in Marseille in 2018; the same year it was screened in Human Rights Nights in Cineteca di Bologna.