In This World


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

How many refugees will the Iraq war create? Hundreds of thousands were displaced in 1991, and as many are now expected to cross the borders into Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Iran.
Meanwhile, on the home front, the prime minister is expected to pacify the anti-war left with a more attractively "redistributive" economy. So Michael Winterbottom's tough, impassive docu-drama about asylum seekers - a Golden Bear award-winner at Berlin last month - couldn't be more timely.
It's a striking addition to Winterbottom's eclectic body of work; roughly but not exactly comparable to his Bosnian war movie Welcome to Sarajevo.
Using small digital video cameras, improvisation, guerrilla filming and available light, Winterbottom follows the overland refugee route from Pakistan through Iran, Turkey and Italy up to Sangatte, Dover and beyond.
This is a route littered with stolen cash, broken dreams and dead bodies: a sickening reverse of the hippy trail where the poor and unhoused of Asia head for the prosperity and welfare payouts of western Europe.
Winterbottom uses two Afghan non-professionals, Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah, more or less playing themselves as a 16-year-old and his older cousin, and tracks them, as it were in real time, after they bet their borrowings and life savings on a terrifying one-way ticket to Kilburn High Road in London, where another cousin is waiting for them.
On the way they are fleeced, starved and exploited, finally encountering tragedy. After filming was complete, Jamal reportedly made use of his unexpired visa to return to London and apply for asylum in real life. He will stay here until he is 18, when he will be deported as an adult foreign national - if they can find him.
In This World is an urgently realist account of the grim commerce in human beings. The movie begins with a voiceover explaining the volume of this traffic; the stages of the journey are shown on a map, a little like the refugee trail in the opening sequence of Casablanca.
But this documentarist side of the movie soon disappears and we are left with the two men's journey itself, during which we must largely intuit exactly what is going on in their heads, because there is little or no dialogue between the two.
Unlike a conventional scripted drama, in which there would be carefully shaped revelatory sequences with Jamal and Enayatullah talking about themselves and their family, and scripted moments in which their own relationship is seen to flower in adversity, the action of In This World unfolds just as I imagine such a journey mostly would in reality: in grim silence, with occasional frantic arguments with people who can't understand what you're saying.
The overwhelming imperative is to press on, to keep moving, and save conversation, intimacy, normal human discourse for when they have reached their goal. Winterbottom shows how the refugees' humanity has been put on hold, in desperately vulnerable storage, while they are on the road.
Recent British refugee/immigrant movies like Jasmin Dizdar's Beautiful People, Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things and Pawel Pawlikovsky's Last Resort have shown the refugees' dire state when they have reached the end of the rainbow - the UK - where they find the poverty, suspicion and ethnic strife they have tried to leave behind is waiting for them here, too.
These were settings in which the political dimensions of refugee status were made explicit. Other movies like Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever and Damjan Kozole's Spare Parts investigate the barbaric motives and methods of the traffickers themselves.
None of this is the case here. Just the journey is shown, and the people who take Jamal and Enayatullah's cash are not shown as obviously wicked, even when they're ripping them off - more chaotic, arrogant and incompetent. And there is no clear expression of what it is the two men precisely want to escape, and what they expect to gain in Britain.
The obvious answers are, respectively: poverty and money. They are economic migrants, but oppressed by the want and destruction caused by vast, geopolitical forces: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the US bombing in 2001.
Jamal's cousin says, vaguely, that he "wishes for a better future" and this better future is evidently to be found in Britain. Because of our benefits system? This is never raised in so many words, but the family do say that they would rather he could get to America, where cracking the welfare system would surely be tougher. Perhaps Britain is a second-prize US.
"You're better off in your own country," says one man curtly before they set off. They are not persuaded. But they are to meet a horrible fate, and when Jamal has to telephone home from London to reveal the full, terrible cost of his better future, Winterbottom shows the old man on the other end of the line for just a few seconds: his face a mask of shock and stoic defeat.
Has it all been worth it? The sheer desperation of thousands of people like this, willing to risk everything, shows they believe it has to be.
In This World does not offer an opinion on that, or on what effect the experience has had on Jamal. He is tough, undemonstrative - a survivor.
Like him, this is a reticent film, both emotionally and intellectually, and for some it may be frustrating. But the harrowingly real picture it paints is a daring and ambitious work.
How many other commercially successful directors, at 40-plus, would head off to the Afghan border to rough it with a DV camera? Winterbottom did, and this prolific and intelligent film-maker has earned another success.


VOCABULARY:

barbaric - barbarzyński

bet - zakład

broken dreams - zawiedzione nadzieje,

curtly - krótko, węzłowato, szorstko, lakonicznie

defeat - klęska, porażka

dire state - okropny, ekstremalny stan

to displace - przesiedlić

to exploit - wyzyskać, wykorzystać

to fleece - pot. obedrzeć kogoś ze skóry

frantic - oszalały, szalony, gorączkowy

to gain - zyskać

grim - ponury, groźny, przygnębiający, srogi,

guerrilla - partyzant, partyzancki

harrowingly - kłopotliwie, męcząco

to intuit - domyślać się, kierować się intuicją

littered - zaśmiecony, zabrudzony, zanieczyszczony

overwhelming - przytłaczający

rainbow - tęcza

refugee - uchodźca

reportedly - według/na podstawie doniesień/(uzyskanych) informacji, prawdopodobnie, przypuszczalnie, rzekomo

reticent - małomówny, powściągliwy

revelatory - ujawniający się stopniowo

reverse - przeciwieństwo, odwrócenie

to rip - uderzyć, zaatakować, rozedrzeć

roughly - w przybliżeniu, z grubsza

strife - konflikt

unexpired - taki, który jeszcze nie stracił ważności

to unfold - odsłaniać, wyjawiać, odkrywać, ujawniać

vaguely - niejasno

voiceover - głos z offu

welfare payouts - zasiłki

wicked - zły



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