Shelter – Farewell to Edén

The kaleidoscopic story of a trajectory, Shelter – Farewell to Edén is the fruit of an encounter – with the Filipino transsexual, Pepsi, who was brought up within the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. After fleeing the movement, she spent ten years in Libya until forced to leave again due to her homosexuality, this time for Europe. Pepsi’s confident voice retraces fragments of her journey through Italy, France, with a longer pause in the United Kingdom, but her final destination remains… “the Moon”. Her face remains invisible but this in no way prevents us from grasping the singular nature of her story and point of view; it also gives a mythical dimension to this silhouette with long black hair, especially as the images that shelter her voice weave another story. Through an interplay of distances or sudden coincidences, they sometimes flesh out her words by showing the places in the odyssey she recounts. And sometimes they open up when other people enter her story – people who have come to Europe in different circumstances but along the same roads, under the same bridges, and who are followed at times by Enrico Masi’s vagabond camera. The images and Pepsi’s account are never totally concordant and the film thus conveys some aspects of exile, of the continuously precarious character of this finally attained security. Going beyond individual dimensions, the film uses snippets of reality to construct a symphony that renders the vital energy of those who arrive in Europe via tortuous routes.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian