"I was born here but I don't feel at home anywhere"

Five young women talk about growing up in a very multicultural city yet feeling they don't belong there nor in the country their parents came from. One of them directs a film in which they share intimate details of their feelings. The film becomes part of their process of adaptation to new identities.

Melanie Pereira was born in Luxembourg to Portuguese immigrant parents. Luxembourg is both very rich and a very multicultural society, where migrants make up 47% of the population of 660,000 rising to 70% in Luxembourg City, 160 nationalities. Portuguese immigrants are the largest minority 14.8%, and Portuguese speakers from Brazil and Cape Verde make up 1.7%.

In the Luxembourg myth of Melusina and Siegfried, Melusina periodically turns into a mermaid in secret, and Melanie uses this image in the title of her film to suggest the fragmented sense of self that she and four of her friends feel. Born there or arriving a few months old, they all have immigrant parents, so they feel that they are at the same time 'immigrants without being one yet also a Luxembourger without being one'. The myth probably originated in Iraq and travelled across many countries, so Melusina is a symbol of women migrants.

Melanie was at school with two of the Melusinas and met the others in 2018 when she was starting to think about the film. "It was beautiful for me to know that they are growing and that their work with me had an impact on them personally."

I spoke to her for The Prisma after her film '½s melusinas a margen do Rio" (The sirens of the river) was shown at DocLisboa recently.

The interview was first published in ThePrisma Multicultural Newspaper in November 2023 and can be read in full with links and stills, here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2023/11/13/i-was-born-here-but-i-dont-feel-at-home-anywhere/