Ibrahim lives in Madrid. He has a job as a bricklayer and a relationship with Mariana. The couple are expecting a child and live happily after having left their countries and the drama of immigration behind. But they don’t have papers. The police stop Ibrahim one day, place him in a CIE and deport him. For the young man, he begins the hell again that will take him to the back of the Melilla fence in an attempt to return home to his wife and his baby.
That fence constantly appears in the news, but its reverse is a world unknown to Europeans: “Many immigrants arrive at the border after having risked their lives in the desert and when they reach their destination they no longer have resources, so they settle over there. Behind the fence there are camps of men, women or people separated by their countries of origin,” says Benito Zambrano, director of El Salto, the story of Ibrahim, which today hits Spanish screens.
Nor is the fence a mere metal wall as it appears to Western eyes. It is much more: “Right now there are four fences on the border that separates Morocco from Melilla. There are ditches between them to make it difficult for migrants to pass. In their day, concertina lines were installed, although people still jumped, throwing blankets and other objects to be able to go over them. But the border is increasingly complicated, because the level of surveillance has intensified,” adds the director in an interview given to La Vanguardia during his time at the Malaga Festival, where The Jump was programmed out of competition.
Melilla may seem like the end of a nightmare after a hellish journey that many sub-Saharans experience. “Some fall by the wayside. One of the boys we interviewed to make the film told us that in the desert they were robbed by the Tuaregs, who go with machine guns because they know that the migrants carry money to pay the mafias. They shot one of his companions, he fell to the ground, they had to run away, they left him there without being able to do anything for him. The nightmare continued in Morocco, where people are often forced to work and then they are not paid and the women are raped.”
And then comes that jump on which everything depends: “If they catch you immediately, they can hand you over to the Moroccan police through a gate in the fence. Therefore, if you manage to jump, you have to run and run and run…”
