Abed Anouti

The Shadow of San Anton

Synopsis
The Shadow of San Anton is a documentary investigating a central prison with a special history. In the city of Cartagena, Murcia, lies the open San Anton Prison, which is about to be abandoned and transformed into an administrative branch of the new Guillermo Miranda Center for Social Inclusion. However, just as the prison is about to close, doors to its hidden past are opened. The transformation is an opportunity to explore the prison and listen to its tales, thereby recollecting or rewriting a dark chapter of Spanish history.

The documentary will recount the history of San Anton Prison – from its establishment, over the Spanish Civil War, to its current image as an open prison about to be transformed. People of Cartagena tell about the horrors that took place inside the prison, horrors that somehow escaped the history books. 
I will enter the prison and by talking to a local historians, living witnesses, the prison director and former inmates, San Anton Prison will step out of the shadow by shedding light on the secrets hidden in its untold history.  By adopting a chronological structure, the documentary leads from a troubled past to a changing present where secrets are revealed when plans are made for the future.

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1963, Beirut. Lives and works in the Middle East and northern Europe.

Like many of his generation from Lebanon, Abed Robert Anouti is a self-educated video documentary maker. Anouti considers his work to be a combination of activism and community involvement, presented in a video documentary, art format. Anouti poses questions related to history, geography and migration. His work focuses on such notions as local history, collective memory, and how public statistics compare with public narratives. Currently he focuses on the affairs of Arab communities in diaspora.
In the past, Anouti has produced video documentaries about Arab modern history and contemporary society, and about how Europe’s satellite television landscape has been transformed, particularly in respect to how European populations of non-European heritage increasingly watch television channels in their own languages. His work is a reflection on diasporic communication, multiculturalism and the representation of displaced or relocated communities. He examines examples of Euro-Arab interaction through the means of Arabic-language, satellite channels, while exploring the evolving dynamic between symbolic and territorial power. Anouti’s work has been shown at film festivals around the Arab world and broadcast on several Arab TV stations including Arabiah, Mustaqbal, Al Alam and LBC.