‘More Than a Sign’, a short filmby Diego Ferrari and writer Jean McNeil, working with filmmaker Bernard Arce, traces German Jewish writer and critic Walter Benjamin’s final journey over the Pyrenees on a rough trail from Banyuls-sur-Mer in southern France to Portbou Catalonia Spain. Benjamin took this route, a trans-border smuggler’s trail, along with other refugees desperate to escape the advance of the Nazis, using the same route as 300,000 refugees had taken less than a decade previously escaping the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. The reenactment of Benjamin’s final walk is a reminder of the border zone as an arena of life and death and also a re-encounter with Benjamin’s legacy, placing his words and work back in the landscape from which he vanished.
