‘Ulises doesn’t live here anymore’ is a documentary focusing on the faiths and contradictory feelings of emigrants that reached Spain.
However, despite focusing on the Spanish issued cases, Juan Carlos García-Sampedro’s film manages to be so universally valid in terms of inner-emigrant-feelings.
The documentary speaks about the various reasons and needs why people left their homes to travel to Spain, but at a closer look, those reasons and needs are in fact the same: the need for basic resources (food, money to fund a home and raise children) and the pursuit of one’s own dreams.
Director Juan Carlos García-Sampedro says it all in the title: ‘Ulises doesn’t live here anymore’. The same way Ulises was ‘carried’ away from Itaca by sea and has been trying hard to get back home, the Spanish immigrants in this short documentary, have left home on a quest of escaping indigence and creating a future for themselves and their families. But also in the same way they fall prey to the same powerful homesick as Ulises. Juan Carlos García-Sampedro’s characters can’t deny their roots, and just like Ulises, their dream becomes their home, the final destination.
It is a phenomena of deep meanings that the director investigates with his documentary: no matter how far you travel, no matter the distance when in quest of achieving your dreams, your originary land will always resonate inside as your home, and will always draw you back.
The many Ulises in this film have left home and somehow they are constrained to stay loyal to their quest, but one day… hopefully, they will return.
‘Ulises doesn’t live here anymore’ is both an exercise of empathy about the humane feelings of this group of people, raising questions both on the problem of immigrants which is approached by governments and a biopsy of the immigrant psychology which are paradoxically on a quest to their own origins.
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