In This World

It is a magnificently crafted film from a cinematic standpoint, following no formulaic conventions about how to tell a story. It mixes dramatic and documentary techniques to create a moody, unflinching look at the plight of refugees of war. By introducing techniques of voice-over fact presentations and title overlays, it sets up an expectation that we are about to watch a documentary, and that what we are about to see is being filmed as it happens. Yet clearly, it must be a fiction, because it's too sharp, clean, and choreographed to be anything but staged. It maintains a curiously detached and distanced voice, and even the characters themselves seem rather remote from their own lives. They have a sad, worn-down air, and seem to trudge ahead with neither hope nor fear even in the most horrific circumstances. Their detachment from their own lives distances the viewer from them as well, unfortunately.

Eclectic English film-maker Michael Winterbottom has produced his finest work to date with 'In this World', a pseudo-documentary account of the attempted journey of two Afghani refugees to London. This film's outstanding achievement is the sense it conveys that despite the ubiquity of television, mobile phones and the English language, this is still a big, poor and very beautiful world. I can't praise the cinematography highly enough - almost every scene is stunningly composed, especially the nighttime crossing of the mountains (shot without the use of additional lighting), yet none feels contrived. Characterisation is minimal, but the viewer feels emotionally bound to the journey. As a rich westerner, I am used to hopping on a plane and flying wherever I wish, but Winterbottom nonetheless succeeds in making me appreciate the culture shock encountered for his protagonists in travelling merely from one side of Pakistan to another. Their journey, of course, is no sort of holiday.

Winterbottom steers clear of direct politics, but we see (along with great suffering) numerous examples of the small ways in which human beings can be nice to one another - the contrast with the xenophobic hatred of the Daily Mail is unspoken but clear. Who knows if the real-life Jamals of this world find happiness? But the message for us is that we forget our shared humanity at our peril.

Motivated by a news story about 58 Chinese immigrants found suffocated in a container at Dover, In This World by Michael Winterbottom is a passionate tribute to the nearly one million refugees a year who are willing to take enormous risks to seek a better life. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival, the film follows two boys, Jamal, 16 (Jamal Udin Torabi) and his older cousin Enayat (Enayatullah) on a perilous overland journey from an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan to seek economic security in the West. Shot in documentary style with a digital camera strapped to the back of cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, the film is fictional but is drawn from a true story and mirrors the desperate conditions of untold thousands whose faces we never see.

The boys are Pashtun who have grown up at the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Pakistan along with 53,000 other Afghanis, victims of the Russian-Afghan War or the American war against the Taliban. The politics of the refugees are not discussed and the film is basically a human story that crosses political and religious lines. Since Jamal speaks some English, Enayat's family asks him to go with him to London where he can apply for asylum as a refugee. From Peshawar, Jamal and Enayat travel by bus to Quetta and over the Iranian border to Taftan and by bus to Tehran. They do not have proper identification and must contend along the way with border guards, police, thieves, smugglers, and numerous changes in currency and language.

The boys bribe a customs officer with a Walkman but when ordered off a bus to Tehran, they meet a group of Kurds who offer them the hand of friendship. There is not much dialogue and the boys mostly improvise the funny stories and small talk as they endure days and weeks of waiting for their next ride. In a sequence of great beauty shot at nighttime using infrared photography, the Kurds help the two boys cross the icy mountains to Turkey, ducking the gunfire of armed soldiers at the Turkish border. Together with an Iranian and his wife and baby, they are then brutally forced to travel inside a shipping container for a 40-hour voyage from Turkey to Italy, a journey where only the strong survive.

In This World is not just a road movie but a human document of urgency and commitment that allows us to experience the humanity of the people some contemptuously refer to as "economic migrants" or "asylum seekers". While it is not a political statement, it is clearly as a slap at the recent hardening of European immigration policies. On a broader scale, however, the film can be seen as an apt metaphor for life. It tells us that the journey is exhilarating but fraught with unimagined obstacles at every turn, yet there are friends who are there for us along the way and, when we feel overwhelmed and hopeless, there is an aching beauty that fortifies us with the strength to keep going.

At the conclusion, I sat stunned near tears. I am often impressed with films I am viewing but I rarely am left speechless. This film is one of those moments when film history is being written. I assumed all along that this was the telling of a true story because of its documentary style. But it is merely representative of the many such stories that happen every day in this cruel exploitative business of people smuggling.

This film makes it's point without being ponderous or preachy. I felt I was there with these beautiful unfortunate young men on the horrendous journey to escape their life of poverty in a refugee camp. This film maker should be given some type of international award for his courage in making this film about this subject matter. I never felt more appreciative of my apartment than I did last night when I got home.

Highly Recommended. 10 points.

This film deserves a wide audience - and we are constantly reminded what or who is in this world, and what that entails. The story line is simple: two Afghan refugees, dispossessed in their land, struggling to survive (on 1 US $ a day, search for new life in a promised land - either the United Kingdom (London) or the USA.

We are all aware of the prejudice meted out to those of middle Eastern descent by the leaders of these 'first world countries'; we are also aware that war and the rampage of war leads to dog-eats-dog scenario.

Without preaching, the director takes us (through an involvement with the young leads, apparently not trained actors) through this world, moving from Afghanistan, to the East (Iran, Pakistan), and landing in Europe (Turkey, Italy, England).

What struck me throughout was the single-mindedness displayed by the younger actors, as they have to cope with a world at once alien and familiar to them.

There are moments of intense kindness by strangers, balanced by the manipulation of others who are motivated by greed and an unempathetic bureaucracy too.

Acting is naturalistic: there are some brilliant cameo shots - and Winterbottom has achieved a Herculean task; the film comes across as a real, hands-on documentary that is unscripted, and where events unfold before one's eyes.

Aided by voice-overs and a montage of black and white images, this has a feel of historic truth, a sense of actuality about it. I was moved by this film, totally.

It is a cry from the director's soul, and (unfortunately) won't reach the people it should. Refreshing, sensitive and an absolute must-see.