Illegal immigration is disconcertingly rebranded as a kind of Hunger/Squid Games-esque challenge by the teenage boys shown here trying to gatecrash Fortress Europe. “Of course, the game is dangerous. If you fall on a mountain, you will die,” says SK, a 15-year-old who is fleeing Afghanistan. “If you pass, you will win. That’s why they call it the game.” Slapping this pop-culture filter on the harsh realities of globalisation gives this Dutch documentary a high-concept jolt, but in actuality it is probably the only way for such young minds to process the traumatic enormity of what they are engaged in, and make light of their own vulnerability.
The distances involved – with some of those playing the “pedestrian game” walking overland from Syria to the Balkans – are mind-boggling. But we are a generation on from the rickety human-trafficking supply lines of Michael Winterbottom’s In This World; many of these migrants seem relatively well-resourced, buying winter clothing and mobile phones to replace confiscated ones en route. They also seem to have the social-media reflex of documenting their journeys. Would-be bodybuilder and biology student SK, with his shy Bollywood smile, hosts his own vlogging-style segments from atop coal freight wagons and mine-strewn Croatian forests.
But this air of 21st-century self-empowerment is entirely superficial. They trudge through snowy countryside at night and fend off bears and wolves with DIY aerosol flamethrowers. Mustafa, a 17-year-old Iraqi, is beaten and tortured by Croatian border police (who come over particularly badly – you wonder how complicit the EU is with their zero-tolerance stance). Often shot in bleary night vision or under sodium lights in interstitial border zones and camps, their ordeals linger with a near-hallucinatory power. But with the testimony of 10 or so different migrants all intermingled, individual journeys get subsumed – perhaps intentionally – into a collective portrait of “the game”. Of course there are no winners here, even those of us with the luxury of watching as global migrant numbers continue to rise.
• Shadow Game is available on True Story on 29 July.
