Paloma Polo

Unrest explores themes of expropriation, exploitation, and emancipation at three planes of reality. The first plane is the reality of those who experience expropriation. The second is the modes of exploitation by various actors. The third plane is the responses to the expropriation and exploitation of those seeking emancipation. The film expands these themes by examining Aurora Pacific Economic Zone and Free Port or APECO in the Casiguran region of the province of Aurora in the Philippines.

Based in Paris from 2016 to 2018 as artist-in-residence at Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paloma Polo committed to an investigation into a dimension of the history of political struggles shaping the Parisian north periphery. The Parisian Banlieue Rouge at large sheltered thousands of Spanish political exiles since the civil war and throughout Francoism. Hundreds of them lived a ghostly existence, many with counterfeited identifications and some completely clandestine, as they strived in the shadows for the organisation of a movement in Spain to democratically assail a brutally repressive and violent system.

The starting point of this film project is Arthur Eddington’s 1919 expedition to the island of Príncipe, a Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea, to observe the effects of a total solar eclipse. There are no photographic records of the experience. Only a stone stele mounted upon a whitewashed plinth —at the approximate spot where the eclipse was observed— reminds us that Eddington’s achievement signified the verification of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

El Barro de la Revolución takes place in the Philippine rainforest and reveals the inner life, without the usual mandate of the camera, of the military, social, political, emotional and educational actions of one of the guerrilla units that Polo visits with his complicity. It is a shared and solidary project, which shapes a story in which the daily duties and urgencies acquire an extreme political and poetic relevance. In short, and from our perspective as spectators, we are once again questioned about the indissoluble condition of the intimate and personal in the political sphere.

“Dulcinea”, a still image film, gravitates around the life and political trajectory of Dulcinea Bellido: a feminist, communist and revolutionary woman who founded the first feminist mass organization during the Franco regime, therefore paving the way for the emergence of the feminist movement in late Francoism and the Spanish Transition to democracy. Bellido’s biographical account, her vital and political experience, acts as a narrative thread to problematize and understand the emergence of feminist thought and its political mobilization in the framework of the struggle led by the Communist Party of Spain — PCE against Franco’s dictatorship. […]

This film unfolds visually and reflexively from a tale narrated to Polo by the Agta indigenous leader Vic Abajon. His voice-over being the central conceit of the work. The story is presented exactly as it was recorded from Vic, an account of an autobiographical event that occurred in 1973 at San Ildefonso, Casiguran Municipality, Aurora province, Luzon Island, The Philippines. Polo recorded it in 2014 while they were working collaboratively on a research project that was to reflect on the reality of displacement, expropriation, and state violence that Vic’s community was enduring.