Shelter: Farewell to Eden

Synopsis

Pepsi is an individual in sexual transition looking for a stable job as a caregiver. Former member of MILF, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front active in an island of southern Philippines, she escaped from her country to work as a nurse for over 10 years in Gaddafi's Libya. Because of gender discrimination, she has been forced to join the flow of refugees. Then, she confronted with European institutions as an asylum seeker, in the city of Bologna, Italy, where she obtained the first acknowledgment of her status. She could not stop there. Her journey continued towards France, crossing the dangerous "pass of death" on the heights of Ventimiglia, strong of her experience in the wild mountains of Mindanao. She reached Paris, where she acquired a second identity and found underground work offering massages, sharing interstitial spaces among the harsh architectures of the metropolis. Her voice over tale is a post-colonial parable, in which European geography mingles with an intimate emotional drama. Her wander recalls the ancient myth of Europe, according to which a young woman was kidnapped and raped by Jupiter, in the shape of a bull, taking her to an island in the Mediterranean from which she would have given the name to the continent.