Journeying across a treacherous ocean in a dinghy is just the first chapter of a long and dehumanising odyssey for those escaping to a new life in Europe 
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Whether they are coming in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33716501">hordes or droves</a>, you might think from the way they are described that the thousands of migrants &#8220;flooding&#8221; Europe each year were an invading army. The news is filled with images of dinghy boats and orange life jackets. Red Cross volunteers wait to register queues of people rescued from sea. Very few of these hundreds can be named in short reports and their stories are often told only as brief, repetitive soundbites. 
George Kurian&#8217;s documentary film The Crossing shows a different point of view. Audiences at the <a href="http://ff.hrw.org/london">Human Rights Watch Film Festival</a> were not waiting with the news cameras looking up at a boatload of blurry faces. They were invited to see what it feels like for people inside the boat when it lands. The film opens with a group of Syrians celebrating as they finally dock in Italy after a life-threatening journey. They jump up and down grinning from ear to ear, kissing their children and peering excitedly out of the windows. 
So begins an intimate and revealing view into what it is like to come to Europe as a refugee. This witty, intelligent, likeable group of Syrians have been uprooted from stable middle-class lives as journalists, musicians, pharmacists and business people. They are living in Cairo but can&#8217;t stay, as their passports cannot be renewed. The group seems just as surprised to find themselves making this dangerous journey as the audience is to watch them. Crammed into a tiny fishing boat for days on end, the group film themselves on GoPros. They joke about being on a yacht and pretend to curse songs, which they previously enjoyed, about the beauty of the sea. Their camaraderie wanes as they experience extreme thirst, their children fall ill, vomit and excrement fill the boat, and they begin to fear they won&#8217;t make it alive. 
Yet once they arrive in Europe, they realise that the crossing was, in many ways, the easy part. The energy of the group is sapped after they are divided across refugee camps in Europe. Forced from their home countries and everyone they know, many fall into depression. One describes the long period waiting for asylum as &#8220;the end of an era, an era of waiting for nothing, the era of losing time, the era of losing your life”. Without friends and a sense of purpose, many feel they are losing their identity. Trapped in a hostel in Sweden, one woman feels she will go mad if she can&#8217;t work as she has been doing her entire life. She and her son sit in the kitchen, glued to videos of the bombing of their hometown. They tell each other not to watch and yet cannot move away from the videos playing on their phones. While the news portrays the physical hardships of a treacherous journey, the film shows how refugees also bring with them deep psychological scars. 
It is this sense of dehumanisation, too, that is dealt with in Mediterranea, also shown at the <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/?s=human+rights+watch+film+festival">HRW Film Festival</a>. This fiction film is based on the real life story of the main actor and co-writer Kudos Seihon. Ayiva and Abbas are two brothers from Burkina Faso in West Africa, who are desperate to get to Europe. Abbas is excited by the European women and beautiful cars his friends in Italy post on their Facebook pages. Ayiva is more concerned with sending money to his sister and young daughter back home. Their journey includes getting kidnapped by militias, being thrown off a small dinghy in a storm, and avoiding the risk of drowning by standing all night, clinging to a large fishing net. 
Their <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2013/10/14/reaching-lampedusa-when-the-quest-for-life-brings-death/">arrival in Rosarno, Italy,</a> is filled with elation and relief. Yet, it is here that the real difficulties begin. The brothers have three months to find a work contract to be able to stay in Europe. They take up jobs illegally picking oranges for small cash payments, vulnerable to the decisions of their Italian employers. Undocumented migration in this part of Italy has often been compared to <a href="http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1953619,00.html">slave labour</a>. The film portrays, in a human and personal way, the dilemmas this presents. When Abbas has picked oranges the wrong way, his boss decides he will not get paid. Screamed at and silenced in front of his peers, he is humiliated. The same boss stands reactionless when another migrant collapses underneath the tonnes of oranges that have fallen on top of him. Yet, this same boss takes a shine to Ayiva, who is a good worker. Ayiva is invited for dinner with his family and befriends his boss’s daughter. Their uneasy friendship is always under threat, as Ayiva knows his life and livelihood could disappear in a second at the whim of any member of this family. And as the farmers abuse the migrants, so they are also abused by those above them. The mafia are a shadowy presence, appearing in the migrant camps to sell goods, collecting money from undocumented prostitutes and even coming to the birthday party of Ayiva’s boss’s daughter. The tension finally spills over when the migrants rise up after their camp is burnt to the ground by police. 
In a moment reminiscent of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Ayiva, who up until now has borne every slight and humiliation, picks up a brick and tosses it into a shop window. These scenes are based on the <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2010/02/04/italy-speed-investigations-rosarno-attacks">Rosarno riots of 2010.</a> Human Rights Watch recorded that eleven migrants were seriously injured in drive-by shootings and mob attacks by angry residents. Despite the public outcry that followed, not one prosecution of the attacks mentioned racism as a possible motivator. 
In one of the final scenes of Mediterranea, Abbas is severely injured trying to escape a mob. His brother is hunched over him, alone in the semi-darkness. Another blurry, nondescript face, unrecognised and unseen. 
Follow the link here for more film reviews from the <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/04/05/p-s-jerusalem-grappling-with-the-homeland/">Human Rights Watch Film Festival</a> (London, 2016).
<pre>Photo Credit: Human Rights Watch Film Festival</pre>

Escaping to Europe: Intimate Views of the Refugee Crisis

Danae Elon documents the cost of defying her father’s wish and returning to Jerusalem 
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Towards the beginning of P.S. Jerusalem, Danae Elon films her young son waking up to watch the snow out of their window in New York. It is the eve of their move back to her birthplace: Israel. 
Her son turns to the audience. 
“What’s that?” he asks. 
“A camera,” replies Elon. 
So begins the story of a <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2014/06/13/maya-at-the-checkpoint/">return to Jerusalem</a>, where personal choices are political and where viewers can never be sure of their own perspective. 
What follows is an unflinching look into the next three years in the life of Elon, her French husband and three young sons. Elon is an Israeli Jew who grew up in Jerusalem. Her father, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/04/obitaury-amos-elon">Amos Elon</a>, was one of Israel&#8217;s most celebrated intellectuals. He advocated for the creation of a Palestinian state and the withdrawal from the occupied territories. In his book, Jerusalem: City of Mirrors (1990), he lamented how Arab and Jewish mythologies had so twisted their view of the city that they &#8220;hated [their] fellow man to the glory of God&#8221;. 
Amos Elon eventually became so disillusioned that he left Israel for good. On his deathbed, he made his daughter promise him she wouldn&#8217;t go back to the country of her birth. But after years living in New York with her husband, Danae Elon decides to defy her father’s wish and return to Jerusalem. She wants her children &#8220;not to be ashamed of who they are and where they have come from”. She wants them to understand who she is. 
Elon’s original plan is to make a documentary based on Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, but she finds that wherever she points her camera in the city, there is an image so saturated with political meaning and controversy that it is hard to get a new message across. And so she <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2013/03/30/five-broken-cameras-and-many-broken-fences/">turns the camera inward</a> to her own house and family. P.S. Jerusalem is a documentary about their adjustment to a new life. 
Amid settlements, <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2015/03/15/rubble-and-ruin-banksys-new-concrete-canvas/">demolitions</a> and vitriolic demonstrations, Elon tries to help her family navigate the contradictions of being Jewish and <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/02/23/from-inside-israel-the-dangers-of-repressing-the-bds-movement/">living in Israel</a>. We discover the city through the eyes of her children. One of her sons is beaten up at school by Arab classmates, but also becomes best friends with an Arab. Her other son can&#8217;t work out what a <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2013/11/14/omar-a-study-of-love-and-friendship-in-the-context-of-occupation/">military checkpoint</a> could be and why it is needed. He stares at a wall built through his classmates&#8217; neighbourhood and realises it has been built in the name of his own protection. 
In one difficult scene, her child asks her if she has been in the army. Her voice falters from behind the camera and she finds it hard to answer. They ask if they will have to join the army and she has to explain that military service is mandatory for Israelis. They seem distressed, trapped, vulnerable and confused. One son asks if they can all leave Israel, and later proclaims himself no longer Jewish. The strain on the family can be uncomfortable to watch, where her husband seems proud to help his children confront a reality, but also wants to escape and “live with normal people”. Elon&#8217;s marriage buckles. Her children seem visibly lost. Raw tensions inside the family apartment blur with the conflict outside its walls. 
The <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/?s=Human+Rights+Watch+Film+Festival+">Human Rights Watch Film Festival</a> often features stories on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jerusalem is the centre of a myriad of human rights violations: people being thrown out of their homes, the demolition of whole neighbourhoods and the construction of illegal settlements. People live in constant fear of being removed from the city or attacked on the street. As Elon found while trying to film the city, these stories have become so repetitive that they can lose their power. 
What P.S Jerusalem manages to do is produce something sincere from a place where narratives have been told, retold and manipulated so many times. The film points out that the conflict is not just about the number of people dead or imprisoned. It is the day in, day out, psychological trauma inflicted on people living in a place where there is so much division. 
We will be reviewing more selections from the <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/04/12/escaping-to-europe-intimate-views-of-the-refugee-crisis/">Human Rights Watch Film Festival</a> (London, 2016) soon.
<pre>Photo Credit: Danae Elon</pre>

Lucy Provan