Inde Ved Siden Af

What is a neighbourhood? What fragile balance makes it a community? Maybe a neighbourhood is like a living organism although also vulnerable? What is integration? How far is it a two-way movement? Although we see practically no faces, this is a living, inhabited film, a film made of interiors, of trees, of bodies that intertwine, of windows that look out over nature, of curtains that are closed and curtains that are opened. It is also made of voices that tell us what it is like to live in that neighbourhood in the outskirts of Copenhagen, Tingbjerg. Sometimes these are contradictory voices because a living neighbourhood is also a neighbourhood made of different viewpoints. Voices that talk about the feeling of community, of knowing everyone, but also how Denmark welcomes or rejects foreigners, of the fear of losing community equilibrium by extending the neighbourhood, that will perhaps make people close their blinds, that might build over a park that all the windows look out on to and where children can play. What is the tree without the forest? What is the tree without other trees, without the other living things around it, which it helps to live, and which help it to live? What is a tree if the forest falls around it? Will the new neighbours be the sort that say “Good Morning”? While all these ideas and doubts go through our minds, the images, filmed in 16 mm, developed at home, are pitted with stains, scratches, dark spots, all defects according to professional criteria, that nevertheless appear here as beauty, as cells that multiply and turn into something even more precious that what we see. 

Pablo García Canga