Synopsis

Michael Winterbottom’s intimate, yet hard-hitting, response to the asylum controversy follows two Afghan teenagers as they escape from the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Pakistan, along the smugglers’ route known as the Silk Road.

Travelling through Iran, Turkey, Italy, and France, Jamal and his cousin Enayatullah embark on a desperate journey to freedom. Short on money, lacking proper papers, and forced to travel in trucks, lorries, and shipping containers, the two boys find themselves at the mercy of the people-smugglers who make their living out of others’ misery. Shot on digital video, In This World is styled as a fictional documentary, using voice-over narration and real refugees and locations (including the now infamous Sangatte camp). The predominantly improvised script creates a powerful piece of guerilla film making.

Related Event

Mr Mohammad Asif (Scottish Afghan Society) and representatives of the Scottish Afghan community will be present for a discussion following the film.

Full Description

Recent films like Stephen Frears’ Dirty Little Things and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts have looked at how awful immigrant experience can often be in Britain. How much optimism can Britain contain if for many people who arrive they are immediately exploited? How to make a film about immigrant hope? Michael Winterbottom puts the issue of Britain to one side and concentrates on the physical manifestation of the quest: in actually trying to get here.

As the two boys In This World journey from an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Western Pakistan, with the intention of entering Britain as asylum seekers, Winterbottom focuses on the slow-burn arduousness of bus rides, border crossings, and the characters’ exhausting general need for wariness. Where Broomfield offered a short cut image of the map with the journey penned in to cover the characters crossing from China to Britain in a matter of minutes, for Winterbottom it becomes the whole film. Not least because it isn’t as direct a journey as the central characters would like. In one sequence they’ve made it to the Iranian border only to be sent all the way back to Pakistan again. As they try and justify themselves in this scene by speaking Farsi rather than Pashdu, and by claiming they’re working on a Tehran building site, everything in their body language suggests they’re Afghan refugees heading west. It isn’t obviously enough to have the strength and commitment to carry your body from one part of the world to another; you’ve also got to feign nonchalance that you’re entitled to do so.

Using widescreen digital video, Winterbottom might suggest width in the image, but he generally creates cramped-ness through focusing on the confines of the bus, or, at one stage, the horrors of being stuck in the back of a locked truck on a boat going across the Mediterranean.

Winterbottom’s theme has often been cramped possibilities – be that the educational limitations placed on Jude, the imprisoned in The Road to Guantanamo, the stifled lives of the two girls in Butterfly Kiss or the emotional confines Gina McKee finds herself trapped within in Wonderland – but perhaps it has never been given more vivid form than here.

Working with a tiny crew resembling a documentary team – Winterbottom, his cameraman, a sound recordist and the actors – the film makers claim they made nothing up, and that the hardest part of making the film was getting visas for a couple of Afghan kids to travel halfway round the world and back. Even one of the setbacks worked in the film’s favour: only the younger of the two actors spoke English, while Winterbottom initially regarded it as prerequisite that both of them did so. This he worked into the film so that though Enayat, is senior in age, it is Jamal who has the advantage by speaking some English.

As with much of Winterbottom’s work, the music can be a bit insistent, and the scene with the boys on the bus being interrogated by border control echoes so many other films that its authenticity feels a bit déjà vu. Maybe if the suspense score had been eschewed, the film would have given us a better sense of the event, and less of movie history. But this is a minor quibble in a fine and daring film, and part of the director’s ongoing struggle to make the world a better place. His production company may ambitiously call itself Revolution films, but there is clearly an ongoing attempt to justify the nomenclature.

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