Pablo Montes Sánchez

The Algerian region of Tindouf is home to more than 170,000 Sahrawis, who have been living in refugee camps since 1976, when Morocco occupied the Western Sahara region. In a place of inhospitable conditions and scarcity, the Sahrawi population lives on dwindling humanitarian aid. Six percent of them face the added difficulty of coeliac disease.

Alfonso Salido Zambrana, 59, has been battling colon cancer since September 2021, the most diagnosed cancer in Spain and the second deadliest. Although the advanced cancer diagnosis was a heavy blow, Alfonso didn’t give up his active life and dedicated even more energy to cycling, a passion he discovered at 44. Since his diagnosis, he has competed in UCI events in Coimbra, a world cycling championship in Glasgow in 2023, and the Spanish and Andalusian championships. His children, Francisco and Verónica, are also cyclists, and she started riding to support her father. Three years later, Alfonso remains full of life and motivation. He rides about 60 kilometers a day, except on chemotherapy days, which are every two weeks. The physical exhaustion from the treatment, he says, fades away as he pedals on the road.

"Sobre vivir" is a documentary about suicide. It aims to make visible the problem and what it represents for a society like ours; it also aims to help break the taboo and stigma surrounding mental health and suicide. As it is a multifactorial issue, we wanted to make a photograph as complete as possible and we have testimonies from up to 60 people, including survivors, family members, psychologists, psychiatrists, associations, politicians and journalists. Some faces are familiar, but most of them are people who have told their story for the first time in this documentary. Suicide is a reflection of the society in which we live and its multiple problems: loneliness, precariousness, stress...