Lisboners (Lisboetas) Sergio Trefaut Portugal 2004
Lisbon, like other Western European capitals, has become a cosmopolitan place. The city from where the Portuguese navigators of old streamed out to explore the Americas, Africa and Asia has in recent years become home to waves of migrants from Brazil, the Ukraine, Nigeria, Pakistan, and other countries. As the excerpt from local Russian-language radio tells us: for 500 years Portugal had been a land of emigration, it has now become a country of reception, with the bulk of new arrivals making landfall in Lisbon. Sérgio Tréfaut’s documentary sets out to record a little of what the lives of these new Lisboetas is like.
Lisboners is a simply told documentary, and judging by the quality of its video footage, made on a tight budget. But while the picture is often bleached out by the intense light that characterises the city, the facts of the matter speak clearly enough for themselves. Immigrant life is precarious, struggle unabating and the reward often meagre.
The range of experiences Tréfaut captures is wide and illuminating. We hear a Russian mother complain about the low-quality of the Portuguese education system, we hear a Nigerian preacher relate the vagaries of contemporary immigration to passages in the bible. We see the birth of a little girl to East European parents and we see the opening of a Bangladeshi mosque in Martim Moniz, once a centre of Moorish Lisbon. As the Ummah tells the congregation, perhaps we can see this as the picking-up of a tradition after a 500 year hiatus rather than as an alien imposition on a European culture. We witness a boorish foreman shilly-shally when his search for exploitable labour finds workers wanting a fair wage and a legal contract. If the episode at the Mosque shows a particularity of emigration to Lisbon, this scene of recruitment likely represents a fact of immigrant labour all over Europe.
Lisboners will perhaps not have as much impact on a metropolitan British audience as it might on the Portuguese viewer less used to the idea of non-native communities living their own life in the interstices of national life. For the average Portuguese, more used to the idea of Portuguese communities abroad than foreign communities at home this is a new and challenging idea. One of the beauties of Tréfaut’s documentaries necessarily flattened for the non-Portuguese viewer is the use made of language. From Romanian-language radio to an Estonian and a Moldavian meeting in the street and hitting on Russian as a common tongue, we hear immigrants living in their own languages. This has the effect of transforming these people from the bumbling, child-like figures they appear when speaking pidgin Portuguese to humans with thoughts and feelings about the world around them and their place in it, which they are able to convey.
The British are used to hearing the English language on the lips of the world. The same is not true for the Portuguese, for whom meeting a foreigner competent in their tongue is a slightly odd and exotic occurrence. Showing the struggle of those who have not yet become fluent try to negotiate Portugal’s baffling bureaucracy, receive medical treatment or just attend Portuguese-language classes brings home the daily struggle of emigrant life. One telling detail that brings home the profound inequality of migration occurs when a Portuguese language teacher asks one of his pupils “where are you from?”. The pupil struggles to formulate a response in Portuguese, but dashes off the name of his home region in the Ukraine. The teacher corrects the student’s grammar, but, unable to pronounce the name, dismissing it as “wherever”.
While it might not be as ground-breaking in Britain as it was in Portugal, Lisboners is a fine addition to an increasing body of work that gives a voice to the experience of those who have found a way inside the walls of fortress Europe.
