With a «Have a nice day» they ended all the letters that Syu Win sent from the prison in Caen, France, to Roger Puente. They had met years before when Roger re-rented his room in a shared flat in Barceloneta during August. From the beginning Suy piqued his curiosity. What was a girl from Hong Kong doing with her Algerian boyfriend locked up all month in a room in Barceloneta? When they left, they forgot a small photo album showing many cities: Orà, Athens, Macau. During the next 10 years, Suy and Roger kept seeing each other, when she stopped by Barcelona. The more I got to know her, the more I wanted to know. He had left Hong Kong eight years ago, had lived in Paris and knew Algeria perfectly. The initial curiosity gradually transformed into fascination. One night, in a bar where they were having a few drinks, following a row started by her ex’s drunken friends, she explained everything to them: fake passports, borders, people, movements, money… A short time later Suy Win fell trying to help seventeen undocumented people cross from France to England and was interned in Caen prison. From here Roger decides to make this documentary that he defines as an ode to love in the form of a film and, indeed, the documentary starts from the enormous fascination that the protagonist, who sees as a Robin Hood of the borders ”, exerts on the author. A fascination that is transmitted to the viewer.
Fragmented and kaleidoscopic, with jumps to different countries and times, the film is built around Syu’s testimony. Transgressive, charismatic, individualistic, in love, endearing and funny, she offers us an intense portrait of the hard and hopeful world, both political and sentimental borders. With an aesthetic that grabs you from the start, and that reminded me of the first underground, that of the Mekas troupe, for the pleasure of filming, for the lack of pedantry, the freshness, the feeling that everything is for to invent and that everything begins anew, the documentary becomes a song to a common world, to a love without borders, outside the dictates of legality and social conventions.
With this step, we close the sixth season of Documentary Visions and also the Mostra. I cannot help being grateful, from the bottom of my heart, to all of you who have accompanied us during these six years and 66 documentaries, to all the authors who have wanted to share your work with us and to Cinemes Girona who have supported us since from the beginning I would like to believe that Visions documentals has fulfilled its function by helping to spread the work of little-known authors and encouraging debates that are often uncomfortable but, in our opinion, necessary.
Even so, I will continue to collaborate with Girona Cinemas with one-off screenings and screenings, which I hope will be of interest to you and also count on your support.
Data sheet
Title: Have a Nice Day
Screenplay: Roger la Pont and Miquel Ángel Blanca
Director: Roger la Pont
Production: Roger la Pont
Calibration: The Interference
Music: Ilia Mayer, Cinema Dub Monks
Sound post-production: Iban Rodriguez, STUDIO LA LLUERNA
Language: English, French, Catalan and Spanish
Year: 2016
Duration: 64′