As World Refugee Day approaches on Saturday, this year’s Refugee Week offers a multitude of events taking place across the UK, including a film festival that takes audiences from Ain el-Helweh – Lebanon’s largest refugee camp for Palestinians – in Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours and to an immigration removal centre in Dreamers, directed by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor.
The UK’s asylum system is the focus of Allies in Exile, a first-person documentary from Syrian film-makers Hasan Kattan and Fadi al-Halabi that premiered on Tuesday at the BFI Southbank, which explores the labyrinth facing asylum seekers. Meanwhile, refugee charity Choose Love, in partnership with Tarot productions, curated a selection of four short films that together chronicle different stages in the search for asylum, from the difficulties of everyday life in a person’s home country through the perilous journeys made over land and sea, and arrival in a hostile environment marked by ostracism and ongoing trauma.The event, which took place on Thursday at Picturehouse Central, London, was entitled Fearless Stories and showcased films that “challenge division”.Josie Fernandez-Marelli, chief executive of Choose Love, says: “The UK wouldn’t be what it is today without all the incredible people and cultures that make it up. As division is growing, it’s more important than ever to work together to make sure that refugees are seen as human beings, with hopes, dreams and ambitions.”
Fearless Stories’ short films include The Long Spring, which was inspired by Olly Ginelli’s time volunteering in the refugee camps of Dunkirk and meeting an Iraqi Kurdish asylum seeker named Saady, who fled his homeland – where he had himself supported displaced people – during Islamic State’s advance. After his arrival in the UK, Saady gained refugee status, reconnected with Ginelli and shared his experiences. The film is mostly set inside the back of a lorry as hours stretch into days and a group of people seek to evade capture by border forces. Saady himself described it as a “very difficult” watch, akin to “see[ing] your nightmare” on screen. Ginelli says: “There’s a heated temperament at the moment about people coming over here, but what they don’t realise is that a lot of people are being forced into jobs where they’re working 80 hours a week and living with 30 people in a two-bedroom house.”
Some of the outcomes of that heated temperament are the antics of a trio of would-be vigilantes in Max Fisher’s Rule, Britannia. Rob and his friend Walshy, with young son in tow, are halfway across the Channel on a nautical mission to “stop the boats”. Yet their own boat soon sinks and gives way to a moral dilemma as an overcrowded refugee boat appears as saviour. The film’s sense of farce has been compounded by the news that a boat belonging to Danny Thomas – an associate of Tommy Robinson – used to facilitate excursions similar to Rob and Walshy’s itself sank. To Fisher, such an instance of life imitating art “seemed inconceivable at the time we wrote the film”. He added: “If we don’t, as a society, get a hold of what is going on, we are going to sleepwalk into not Nigel Farage [being] our PM. We are going to sleepwalk into something much worse than we have now.”
With its focus on the plight of women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Elham Ehsas’s Bafta-nominated film Yellow looks at the otherwise mundane act of shopping for clothes – which essentially means the full-cover chadaree. Ehsas says the film is a reminder to those who have looked away from the country since the Taliban’s return in 2021 and seeks to “show Afghan girls and Afghan women in a different light … they’re funny, they’re brave, they’re intelligent”. Yet it remains the case that “their fundamental rights have been rescinded and this is a society that is almost an apartheid state between two genders”.
Set on a London housing estate, Alexandra Wain’s In the Clouds observes the refugee experience through the eyes of six-year-old Sara. An atmosphere of claustrophobia abounds, with Wain’s use of colour reinforcing the sense of loss that permeates the film. What counts, for Wain, is the ability to form “a connection and empathy to these characters”. She has received messages from people who have seen the film and related to the experience, including recently arrived Hongkongers who speak of their alienation.
“As people,” Wain says, “we need to feed our inquisitive minds, and Refugee Week allows us to engage with arts, culture and stories from people we may never have a chance to engage with.”
