"I was a 'mena' and now we will make films with our own stories of immigrants"

Note to readers: EL PAÍS offers the Future Planet section for its daily and global information contribution on the 2030 Agenda. If you want to support our journalism,

subscribe here.

"The black man comes out to be killed," Thimbo snaps with a laugh, when asked if among so many series and films in which he has participated lately, he has only had minor roles.

“I wish it were secondary.

I always go out and I'm dead, ”he alleges, with more laughter and gratitude, because he has a job.

Although he is not always enough with what he earns, he says, he travels and meets people now that he is finally showing a foot in the Spanish audiovisual industry.

Senegalese Thimbo Samb was a mena - a word with a negative connotation that comes from an acronym: "unaccompanied foreign minor" - who arrived in Spain 14 years ago, in a canoe that the Atlantic dragged to Tenerife.

More information

• Minors alone

• The minor who traveled to the Canary Islands on the helm of a merchant ship: "On the fourth day I only thought of a plate of rice"

• The 'menas' are children

When he was 17 years old when he got on that unstable boat, near Dakar, he was already an actor, the son of an actress and the grandson of a singing grandmother of whose art he considers himself heir. In front of him, in a Senegalese restaurant in the Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid, the actress from Guinea Conakri, Aicha Camara, nods with a resigned smile: "They only call me to be a prostitute," he adds. However, their enthusiasm jumps out of their eyes when they say that Camara has written the script for a film that Samb is going to star in, and that they have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to make it come true.

Abdoulaye 'Thimbo' Samb and Aicha Camara are professional colleagues, in Spain, a country where they settled in quite different circumstances: Camara arrived at the age of nine (he is now 27), by plane, hand in hand with his mother and with the family reunification papers that his father, who had already been a refugee in Spain since 1997, had painstakingly put together. But their stories converge: they both come from West Africa, both now live in Madrid and together they embark on this adventure of obtaining financing for make a feature film.

It will be called

A Dream

and it will be about the case of another Guinean emigrant –at the time, Camara's uncle– named Lanfia Keita, who died a little over a decade ago in the Valencian Community.

Keita's death was the sad outcome of a migrant life that the newspapers talked about, because he was a thirty-year-old lawyer who had practiced his profession in Conakry until the bankruptcy of the firm where he worked forced him to seek his life, first in his city and, later, as a mantero in Spain.

Then he became ill with leukemia and had to undergo the

illegal

way of the cross

in search of health care.

It was the fourth time we tried it;

once we had a four-day trip and the ship began to sink and we turned

Keita had left his wife and three-year-old son in his country, and had survived the fearsome African route by land (Guinea Conakry, Mali, Algeria, Morocco) and even the hunger of the sea, which swallowed up a good part of the companions of the trip in patera, "but here the title of lawyer was useless", says his niece.

Samb, who will play Keita on screen, was also the survivor of a voyage across the ocean that lasted nine days, as he himself tells it: “It was the fourth time we tried it;

once we had a four-day voyage and the ship began to sink and we turned back.

We went alone, because those who charge us don't even get on the boat.

The other time there was no more food and we went back;

on the fourth we decided that it was to arrive or die ”.

Aicha Camara during a shoot.

Hence the value that Samb gives to Camara's writing work, who, in his opinion, has achieved a "powerful and necessary story because there are thousands who leave their lives in this attempt."

Both want to explain to their brothers and sisters in Africa that "Europe is not how we think" and tell their neighbors here that "there are manteros who were teachers or lawyers in their countries", in the words of the actor, who has worked on the series

Anti-riot,

by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and

Nasdrovia,

created by Sergio Sarria, Luismi Pérez and Miguel Esteban;

in

Black Beach,

a film by Esteban Crespo, as well as in

Servir y Proteger

,

a series by RTVE, and in

Fuerza de Paz

,

a thriller, also from Televisión Española, among others.

Migrants die in the first minutes of the film

“It makes me laugh when they say that menas charge… The only thing I received for free in Spain was a ticket that the Red Cross bought me to go from Madrid to Valencia, after spending 20 days in a CIE [Foreigners Internment Center]. When we arrived in Valencia, I refused to go to a center for minors, I wanted to work and, then, I slept on the street for three months ”, recalls Samb. Of course, neither he nor almost anyone likes the word that lately designates minor migrants who have entered Spain alone, but it seems an appropriate time to throw ghosts and for an unaccompanied former minor to speak first person: “I was an ore, and I have participated in several movies and several series. Now I am in the stage of creating a play with the Teatro Sin Papeles company in which we will recreate a

Don Quixote

with black artists, without paternalism.

Any fictional character in history could have been black, ”he emphasizes.

We will do a

Don Quixote,

with black actors, without paternalism.

Any fictional character in history could have been black

“Someone has to start changing things. I had no references in this country, I had to create my own. If in 25 years time the migrants arrive and still have to ask where they have to go, we have failed. Why can't we be the referents? The change has to start today, for us. We have to create opportunities, because we have the talent to write and to act ... We may not be the protagonists of this change, but we have to initiate it ”, claims Samb. He is aware of how different the African diaspora looks from societies such as the French, who live with integrated foreigners and who habitually create because their contact with immigration is many more decades old. Then, he adds: “Diversity is important,and that is why many films and series that are made outside of Spain are attractive; There are not only black people there, but Indian or Chinese women, for example ”.

In her turn, the actress and screenwriter reinforces: “The roles they give us are immigrants who don't know how to speak Spanish or top blanket vendors who die in the first few minutes. That is why we want to carry out our own project, which is to tell ourselves our own story. I want to talk about the mafia, the thousands of euros that are paid and those that remain on the road ”. However, Camara's voice will soon break when she remembers her uncle, a shame that is updated when she describes her own pilgrimage in search of producers to help her tell her story: “I did not get to present the project due to the requirements that they put. That's why we started crowdfunding ”, he explains.

Thimbo Samb encourages its director: he is a

youtuber

, he has more than 80,000 followers on Instagram and half a million on TikTok. "Of course we will get the 100,000 euros we need to start," he announces, without giving rise to any musing. Aicha Camara is accompanied in this vital adventure while she continues working as an optician and studying a master's degree in her specialty: “I like health sciences; In my country there are many blind people, when they simply need glasses, so I studied to be an optometrist. I dream of one day opening a clinic in Conakry ”. Goals are not lacking.

FUTURE PLANET can follow on

Twitter

,

Facebook

and

Instagram

, and subscribe

here

to our 'newsletter'

.