Plot

Border Life, shot in a border town between Benin and Nigeria, is a contemplation of space and movement. Of life pulsing through a locality set up to divide. Of unstoppable mobility where mobility is circumscribed and controlled. The camera doesn't fix things in place; it wanders. From checkpoint to city streets thronging with cars hiding smuggled goods from Italy and Thailand, from ambulant bankers to fishermen turned traffickers, a never-ending rush. A never-ending hustle. No time to stop for long conversations. No conventional characters but lives in motion captured for a fragment of a second. This essay film turns into an invitation to experience the daily life of those who live on and from the border, in fragments, in rhythms, in relentless flux.

Border Life is a documentary about the bustling West African border town, Seme, situated between Benin and Nigeria, where the setting itself becomes the film's main character. It is a vitriolic portrait of a singular place, a "no man's land," called the most absurd border on the African continent, full of chaos and mystery. The secondary characters in the film are the peddlers, smugglers, cross-border travelers, and small traders, those who are in transit and those who live on either side of the border. This project is a critical investigation of borders. At a time when politicians around the world are calling for the reinforcement and militarization of borders, and border crossing is a potentially criminal and often life-threatening act, it becomes urgent for us to scrutinize the meaning of borders. Rather than reifying borders as a natural given, this project is a plea to reflect on the inadequacy and the arbitrariness of our own constructions of national territories. The border town Seme is a microcosm of contemporary West Africa where national borders do not correspond to people's local realities, but materially shape space. They are not as violent as elsewhere in the world, yet they still try to control passages between peoples, even though order and control escapes them. Officials aspire to divide and organize, but borders instead become a place of encounters, transactions, and back-and-forth chaos. Most people who work on and around these borders are marginal in the metaphorical but also in the social sense. It is the hustlers, the smugglers, the small traders, and the swindlers who live on and off the border, at the margins of society and at the edge of legality and illegality. Around this border, the documentary cracks open the contradictions of the nation-state and traces the unseen shadows of the globalized world. Everyday realities such as the prices of the food that characters buy or sell are impacted by events abroad, such as the war in Ukraine. Most of the products crossing the border come from China. Why does a Chinese product become an object of speculation somewhere in West Africa? Why does half of a family live on the Nigerian side of the border, and the other on the Beninese side of the border? And why do the border agents try to hinder a peasant from selling his agricultural products on the other side of the border, to his own people?