process

The selection process: 8 May, Tuesday We started to search for possible partners and participant teens. First, we went to Cerdanyola district to see a foundation which supported children and teenagers who lived in the neighbourhood. Children aged 8-20 attend this institution, children from predominantly immigrant families. The older ones often cone only because, despite the fact that they grew up here, they did not get citizenship or work permit automatically, and if they are not employed illegally, they just walk around aimlessly. At the foundation they can use the computers and take part in the educational programmes.

Teachers emphasize that youngsters attending the institution are usually hard to deal with, and rather undermotivated. Most of them sometimes come other times not. We had the impression that was otherwise affirmed by out assistant/interpreter, Monica, that associates of the foundation were so deeply involved and slightly exasperated that however helpful they are, in fact they don’t want anybody to chip into the process they started with the youngsters who contacted them. It was confusing in a sense that it planted the feeling in us that it would be impossible to start our project in May and find an enthusiastic group to work with. Luckily it happened other way. On the one hand we were almost resigned to failure, but at the same time, in the first days started to fluster, which fortunately disappeared later.

At the selection process, although our intention was to choose children ourselves, we weren’t aiming to find children for specific characters but for teamwork and doing so we had to take many aspects into consideration: their free time, their age (we wanted children of similar age), their enthusiasm; so it was important for us that they could spend a lot of time with us and that they were willing to spend that time with us. Despite all this, or especially because of this, we managed to select exactly the ones who wanted to participate indeed.

After visiting the foundation we went to the high school called Institute Pla d’en Boet. Everything was speeding up here. Delícia – member of the Can Xalant staff – arranged us a meeting with a local teacher, Elvira Carrió who otherwise organised drama classes at school. She was very nice and helpful, moreover, extremely constructive. After we had briefly explained her what we wanted, she agreed and encouraged to set off and visit some classes to tell them our ideas personally. We were all surprised, Delícia rushed back to pile up the posters and Katalin tried to remember as much of her Spanish as she could and we entered classes where we met kind and helpful teenagers.

Finding the right children for our project was absolutely successful and we reached our goal to find the right number of motivated young teenagers for the shootings of the episode. At the same time, we should be aware of how much the children and different factors of the selection process affected the “research” and modified even the project. As we had created our project plan without knowing anything about the place, it was predictable that local characteristics would modify and direct the work.

13 May, Sunday. I realised that the plan we had handed in was matching only with the core structure of the actual project that could be carried out. Without local knowledge, in our plan we were referring to the fact that as the town was growing, there were new quarters emerging where inhabitants moved in and with the help of our film we wanted to study the needs of these people.

However, in lack of local knowledge it was not clear for us that the newest quarters of the town were far from Can Xalant, so we were developing the project in a different environment that we first decided to focus on.

When in Budapest, we started planning our stay, we asked Oriol (collaborate of Idensitat) to get in touch with local organisations, schools so as to help our search for children interested in our project. Our motivation was avoiding a situation when nobody would have been interested in our project. Oriol might have been surprised as that could have been part of the fieldwork that we ourselves find the right group of children. As time was short, we could not chose this. We were very lucky to work with the IES Plat d’en Boet and to have the drama teacher’s help as well as to find such enthusiastic kids.

The children attended the school close to Can Xalant; they came from the neighbouring districts which were mainly expanding in the past. Katalin suggested that the place of the story should be the whole town. This was appropriate as – opposite what we presumed - new quarters were integrated to the “body” of the town, were connected to the centre, so the town and its services and urban areas formed a homogeneous unit. Also not all kids were living in the same area.

As Katalin claimed even from the viewpoint of the shooting, the town is not too big, can be easily walked round as children tend to often do it. So – even we did not look deeply into te life of any neighbourhood – when searching for places for the film, talking about the city each part of it was included and discussed.