Owners of Nothing

Five-year-old Fatima has very poor sight. She can see hardly anything without glasses. For the most part, her life takes place in a haze; it is only at school that she sees well. There, in a locked drawer, lies her greatest treasure: blue spectacles with thick glass. At the end of every school day, she has to put them back in the drawer. Fatima lives in El Vacie, a slum area on the outskirts of Seville, Spain. Her parents are extremely poor. They own practically nothing, not even a proper roof over their heads. They cannot afford eye-glasses for their daughter. In their shanty, which the first downpour will easily wash away, rats and other vermin have free play. There is no running water. In his film about the shockingly shabby El Vacie – one of the oldest slums of Europe - the young filmmaker Sebastián Talavera makes use of hip editing techniques and striking photography. OWNERS OF NOTHING is a poetic portrait of the slum and its inhabitants, paying equal time to the daily misery and the children’s zest, who dream of a better life, ‘wherever, as long as it’s not in El Vacie’.