The year 2011 will remain in every Arab’s mind as the year when people went out on the streets to demonstrate their long stifled political voice. Whether in Tunisia, where the head of state was toppled, or in Bahrain, where popular dissent was quashed, the Arab (and greater) world saw a turning point. In Syria, however, what started out as protest brewed into an ongoing war that instigated one of the most sudden displacement crises in modern history. The level of forced migration caused by the various forms of violence posed dire questions to the international community on the right to movement, the right to asylum and the continuous redefinition of these concepts. The meaning of home and safety probed even deeper existential questions on legal, political, and diplomatic levels. A harsh light was shed on the arbitrary nature of borders and the power dynamics between those escaping war and those who could offer support. Safety, in this case, became a currency for the rest of the world. Care for fellow human beings was seen, not as a duty for nation states to act responsibly to create and offer refuge to those escaping violence, but as tokenistic transactions.
With the formalisation of these questions, a new response had to be created to an entirely new and urgent set of needs. The next set of films address three of the questions of destination and legally afforded safe spaces in the context of the Syrian exodus from war. Presenting completely different filmic styles, we start with an ethnography on design policy by looking at the design and commodification of the individual home. Shelter without Shelter walks us through the policy-making process of institutions, designers, lawmakers and companies who must think of the solutions surrounding relocation of people escaping war. Next, we move from purposed design, to the experimental repurposing of an abandoned space. Central Airport THF is an observational film exploring how a space is perceived and how it can be redefined to serve another purpose than what it was built for. Here we see the successes and the failures of this lived experience in Berlin’s abandoned city airport. And finally, Purple Sea is a tragic, poetic documentary that is set between liquid borders. This abstract and impressionistic essay was shot as people were floating in the water after the biggest boat capsize in the Mediterranean. Co-director Amel Alzakout allows us the space to more seriously consider the powers that play around the lines that create our so-called nation states.
This selection of three films poses the question of what defines ‘home’ both physically and conceptually, what rights we have to it, who decides, and finally, how these decisions, policies and contradictions forever affect people’s lives.
08/02/2023
Shelter Without Shelter (2019)
93min | UK | English with English Subtitles
Director: Mark E Breeze & Tom Scott-Smith
Shelter Without Shelter explores the great hopes and profound challenges of sheltering refugees across Europe and the Middle East since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. Filmed over three years, between 2015 and 2018, this documentary investigates how forced migrants from Syria were sheltered across Europe and the Middle East, ending up in mega-camps, city squats, occupied airports, illegal settlements, requisitioned buildings, flat-pack structures, and enormous architect-designed reception centres. With perspectives from the humanitarians who created these shelters as well as the critics who campaigned against them, the documentary reveals the complex dilemmas and colossal failures involved in attempts to house refugees in emergency conditions. Based on innovative new research at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, Shelter Without Shelter offers insights into a universal human experience. We all need shelter, but what is it? First is the question of the purpose-built structures for those who arrived in the mass refugee camps. Shelter Without Shelter looks at the policy-making, ensuing commodification of refugee homes and the perceived end experience. Asking the question, what is shelter, the film also questions the process through which decisions are made. While the film does not give much space to those for whom the policies are being developed, it offers a magnified look at the question from the policy-making side of the question. Through the testimonies of those involved we hear the level of calculation involved in the attempt to offer a solution at odds with those who dare to add humanity and warmth. This film presents the value of space as a home and source of dignity and respect, and the impossibility of staunching the problem at its root: violence and displacement.
15/02/2023
Central Airport THF (2015)
Director: Karim Ainouz
96min| Germany| German and Arabic with English Subtitles
Berlin's historic defunct Tempelhof Airport remains a place of arrivals and departures. Today, its massive hangars are used as Germany's largest emergency shelter for asylum seekers, like eighteen-year-old Syrian refugee Ibrahim. As Ibrahim adjusts to his transitory daily life of social services interviews, German lessons and medical exams, he tries to cope with homesickness and the anxiety of whether or not he will gain residency or be deported.
01/03/2023
Purple Sea (2020)
96min | Germany | Arabic with English subtitles
Director: Amel Alzakout & Khaled Abdulwahed
Since the way to Europe remained blocked for Syrian artist Amel Alzakout, she was pushed to cross the Mediterranean Sea with smugglers. However, halfway to reaching the coast of Lesbos, the boat she was on, carrying 300 people, sank. With a waterproof camera strapped to her wrist, the chaotic events were recorded. The filming, intended to be a documentary of the journey, instead became a record of a tragedy. The muffled images, mostly underwater, of high-colour saturated by the brilliant sun, is the story of an emergency. The boat sank in a no-man’s land, somewhere between Turkey and Greece. The maritime services of the surrounding states were reluctant to send help. Amel’s poetic narration throughout the film leads us into her thoughts, existential throughout, a stream of consciousness that helped her to survive. She, along with a group of stateless people, is now floating and swimming, caught between the borders, between legalities, with no welcome or entrance pass. Forty-two people lost their lives in this tragedy. The situation begs the question of choice between respect for borders and respect for human life.
References:
See this essay written by Merle Kroger with Amel Alzakout, based on conversations about her experiences leading up to the film, online at https://merlekroeger.de/en/5/purple-sea-essay
For in-depth background on the formation, the intentions behind and recording the images, and the making of the film, please watch this interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tExK7__ievE