Source: BBC

He is the son and grandson of refugees and now Tamer Ismail is one himself. The 14-year-old, born to a Palestinian family in Syria, finds himself in claiming asylum in Austria after his parents bought his passage – alone – to Europe. In the short film The Purple Field which premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in December, Tamer narrates waiting at the EU borders as like “the Day of Judgement. There were Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians – none of us knew what was going to happen, and we were all afraid.”

Made by Palestinian director Nasri Hajjaj, the son of refugee parents in Lebanon, the film was funded by sympathetic Austrians and is one of the first attempts by cinema to create a first-person account of the experiences of thousands of people who have crossed from the Middle East to Europe this year.

The problem, according to British director Sean McAllister, who showed his award-winning documentary A Syrian Love Story at Dubai, “is always how to put a human face to suffering.” He found his with Raghda and Amer, a couple who meet in a Syrian prison before the civil war, only to find their relationship crumbling under the pressure of exile in France.

That’s the challenge: to find an image that resonates in a way a 30 second news report can’t – Sean McAllister

“When I started to make the documentary, no one cared about Syria,” says McAllister, “and I’m not sure who really cared about Syrian refugees until that photo of that poor little drowned toddler hit the headlines. That was almost pornographic in the way it shocked. That’s the challenge of the director too – to find an image that will linger with audiences, to resonate in a way a 30 second news report can’t.”

The narrator of Nasri Hajjaj’s The Puple Field describes waiting at the EU borders as being like “the Day of Judgement” (Credit: Nasri Hajjaj)

The best-known film-maker yet to tackle what he himself calls “the desperation and the loneliness of ‘the other’ in society” is Jacques Audiard, whose Tamil-language film Dheepan won the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year. Audiard says he made Dheepan in Tamil, which he doesn’t speak, so he too could understand the isolation of the refugee.

Others are even more radical in their methods, asking refugees to tell their own story, not through documentary, but in feature film. Mediterranea was the runner up in this year’s Lux Prize, which is awarded by the EU to a film “that casts a spotlight on the heart of European public debate.” First-time director Jonas Carpignano, an Italian-American, follows the trek of a young man from North Africa to Lampedusa in Italy. He is played by the director’s best friend, Koudous Seihon, who himself made the journey from Burkina Faso to Italy some years ago, almost drowning at sea.

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