El Ejido, la loi du profit

El Ejido is today the third richest town in Spain, with profits built on the millions of tons of vegetables it produces every year, fuelled by legal and illegal migrant labour. This documentary highlights Spain’s relatively recent switch from exporting to exploiting workers. Most have no contract and live in conditions so intolerable they exploded into riots in 2000 and 2004. Filmed along a strip of Andalusian coastline not far from the Costa del Sol tourist traps, we see an unending sea of white plastic greenhouse tents. Beneath these burning roofs, Moroccan, Romanian, Malian and Senegalese migrants pick fruit and vegetables in unbearable temperatures. Jawad Rhalib presents a truly personal portrait of these migrant workers, taking us into their self-built plastic sheeting homes amidst the garbage-strewn slums. His interviews reveal the vast differences in this ghettoised section of society from illiterate nomads to educated yet impoverished workers with only one thing in common: a desperate need to leave their countries. (DOK.fest München)