Plaza Catalunya, in the heart of Barcelona, is an icon of the city visited every day by thousands of tourists who get fed up selfies. But these days, there is something different on the postcard. The filmmaker Mia Hoa Lee (Girona, 1980) has camped at this nerve point to move a clear message: he will not eat until Israel raises the food block in Gaza.
He has been hungry strike for eight days and stands firm. “It still remains,” he says as a half smile. He sits, straight, on some cushions planted in the middle of the camp where he lives from the last day of July. It is surrounded by Palestinian flags, posters and water, which is the only thing it ingests. He knows that his presence challenges many of those who pass by. It seeks to bother them and turn on them a spark that leads them to “break the silence and inaction.”
“This is still a performance. Really interpreted and with its consequences, but a performance. I seek to attract people's attention and make, when they look at me, they are also forced to look at Gaza, ”explains the filmmaker. And they see her. In less than an hour almost a dozen people are approaching to talk to her. Many are neighbors who, like Roser, have known their action through social networks.
“I just wanted to know if you needed something,” he asks, shy, is septuagenaria. Read doubt for a moment. “Well, a hug, goes,” he says before getting up and melting with this stranger, who congratulates her in his ear and repeats: “You are very brave.”
Before these words, Lee's bearing hardens a little and, although without losing his everlasting smile, he corrects Roser. “I am not brave. For me it is easy, unlike the people of Gaza, I do have dozens of people and various doctors who will help me. Neither I am brave nor this is my action: we are dozens of people behind this camp. I am only the visible face,” says the filmmaker.
This type of interactions, he explains, are frequent. “You do not have to worry about me, but for them. They will die if nothing is done and at least I do not fall bombs on top.” It refers to the thousands of people affected by the attacks and the blocking of supplies imposed by Israel, but also to the four people – three journalists and a sanitary – who more than two weeks ago began a hunger strike in Gaza to demand that they begin to enter supplies.
This action, baptized as Empty Stomach Movement (Movement of empty stomachs), was the inspiration that led Lee to emulate them in Barcelona. “I heard his shout and replicate him. It is a desperate call to the international community,” says the filmmaker, who attends to this medium wearing a shirt in which “Gaza hurts.”
“It hurts. It is an unbearable pain since the events of October 7 (date that is considered the beginning of the current conflict).” That day, which also coincides with Lee's birthday, it was a schism for her. Gaza became a constant concern on his head, which until then was centered “on surviving.” She defines himself as a person “sensitive to inequalities”, a quality that he developed during his childhood, an era that defines as “difficult” due to the insults and discriminations he lived due to his Korean ancestry.
“It is always the same issue: a struggle between oppressed and oppressors. But if we surrender to think that everything is lost, because I get off this lies life. I am an optimistic person, I am looking for solutions. And as I do not have them, so I have created this meeting space.”
For Lee, the hunger strike is “an excuse.” He assures that if he were not depriving himself of eating, it would not be possible to camp so many days in Plaza Catalunya. He says it while returning the greeting to a couple from the urban Guàrdia. “At first they treated me with condescension, but when they knew I wasn't eating, they started treating me different,” he says. “I think they are waiting for me to give me to throw us away, but for that there is still missing,” he says.
A meeting point
The camp in which Lee sleeps is not only its temporal home, but it has also become a meeting point for various proportions, as well as for activists and even citizens looking for a place to stop on the way. “The important thing is that we look at us. It is not necessary to make a hunger strike like me, why don't you bring your friends tomorrow and you start reading a book?” Asks the filmmaker to Roser, pointing out her little library.
Next to the books also rest a block of leaves and a box with colored pencils that are now using two children, of French origin, who draw Palestinian flags surrounded by fists high and the word free.
“This is the real action. Get together and encourage us. Being 24 hours a day on the street I have been able to observe people and I have realized that there are many more things that unite us than those that separate us. I have seen much more love that I hate. And from there we have to leave,” says Lee.
Now, these days have not been exempt from incidents. The filmmaker recounts episodes of verbal violence, shouts and even passers -by who have spit on knowing his cause. “We immediately realized that I couldn't stay alone,” explains Bashar, one of the people who usually guard every night in front of Lee's store. He only sleeps when she wakes up and then throws a small nap in the mattress before working.
“We protect each other. We complement each other. I do a hunger strike because I know my body and that is what I can contribute. The important thing is that we look and force people to take sides,” says Lee. These words have a very specific recipient: the Catalan Academia of Cinema, whom he accuses of not having positioned himself since the beginning of the conflict, despite the fact that Lee himself has explicitly requested it.
Did it in a Intervention during the Gaudí Awards gala And he did it again just before starting his hunger strike. Then he sent a statement to “everyone” from Catalan cinema. His words were already endorsed by 30 filmmakers such as Carla Simón or Irene Moray. Then diverse more were added. But Lee continues to notice absences.
“It is a statement of media war. There are two or three entities of the audiovisual sector that have the obligation to position themselves at once. I get on strike to put them in front of the mirror, because I have this speaker, but I do not have the power to press anyone to change things. It is not fair, because I instead of being with my daughter I am here while they, who do have that power, are on a sailboat in the sailboat in the cave filmmaker
