Dir.
Michael Winterbottom, 2002, UK, 88 mins, some subtitles
Cast:
Jamal Udin Torabi, Enayatullah
In 2002 in Peshawar, Pakistan, a young orphan boy named Jamal leads a day-to-day existence working in a brick factory. He is an Afghan refugee and lives in Shamshatoo - the camp in which he was born. When the family of Jamal's cousin, Enayatullah, decide to send their son to England, Jamal, who speaks some English, convinces them that he would make a useful travelling companion.
Through significant financial sacrifice, Enayatulla's family is able to send the boys on their journey. However the path the cousins must take is an arduous and highly risky one, through Iran, Tehran, into Turkey and onwards, towards a far from certain welcome in the U.K.
Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Michael Winterbottom's In This World highlights the plight of displaced people and their struggles to build new lives. The experiences of refugees in the U.K. have been the focus of a number of films of recent years, most notably Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort and Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. But whilst these films reveal the problems and hostilities faced by refugees in Britain, In This World explores what happens to people before they arrive. The identity of Winterbottom's main character immediately foregrounds the often complex situations of refugee people - an orphan, born in the refugee camp, Jamal is not merely a displaced person, but one who has literally never known a place of his own.
Writer Tony Grisoni cites the reading of many first-hand accounts of refugees as the initial point of reference for the story - the filmmakers acknowledge "a long list of un-credited co-writers - the people who actually make these journeys."
However, Winterbottom and Grisoni also say that far from adhering to a set script, the story of Jamal and Enayatullah's journey developed as actors and crew experienced their own journey. The flexibility of the filmmakers for working in so many different and politically sensitive locations lends a great sense of spontaneity. Likewise Winterbottom's encouragement of his non-professional lead actors to improvise dialogue gives their exchanges a lively, intimate quality. These 'natural' touches and the use of DV have raised comparisons with documentary, comparisons that producer Andrew Eaton is somewhat uncomfortable with: "Everybody uses the 'documentary' word. And there's a part of me that gets worked up about that. Because it's not like it's deliberately set out to be like a documentary, it's more about a degree of reality. It's trying to get at an element of truth about the way you see the world, but actually telling a story at the same time."
However, the knowledge that the young actor who plays Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi) has himself returned to England and claimed asylum since the making of the film further confuses the distinction between fiction and reality. In choosing this potentially cheerless subject Winterbottom clearly faced a number of challenges - it is difficult to make the tedium of a long and monotonous journey interesting and to show the vibrancy of life in a dismal slum. But with warm dialogue and striking images - a kite fluttering in the breeze, children playing football in the camp - In This World keeps interest, and is often surprisingly upbeat. Winterbottom doesn't want simply to evoke our sympathy - there is a lot of sadness in the story, but we aren't allowed to just to feel sorry for his characters: Jamal is not pitiable, he is resourceful, clever, optimistic - determined to claim a "good future" for himself.
Rather than pity, we are encouraged to empathise with Jamal and Enayatullah, to experience at least something of their journey, as the actors and filmmakers did. Winterbottom's film was originally titled M1187511, the reference number given to Jamal when claiming leave to stay in Britain. It was renamed In This World, a phrase used by Jamal when making a phone-call back 'home' - which gains great poignancy by the end of the film.
Indeed, Jamal's story cannot be assigned a case number and doesn't fall comfortably into any categories of the Home Office. Winterbottom wants to counter the misrepresentation that such simplistic categorising of people fosters: "You can't say this is a political refugee, this is an economic migrant. They're definitions - and definitions are ways of creating divisions that don't actually exist in reality. A person leaves their country for a whole bunch of reasons and comes here for another whole bunch of reasons, and it's bureaucracy that tries to divide them into these two camps." The film seeks to cut through the bureaucracy and the asylum statistics, and succeeds in telling us something of the human struggles they obscure.
Winterbottom summed up his attitude after a screening of his film at The London Film Festival: "If you've spent time with people who've been on a journey like that, then hopefully you feel sympathetic to them as individuals. Whatever your political perspective, you should feel like, actually, surely that person, if he's got here or she's got here, we should be able to say, 'ok, you can stay, we will make you welcome.' Even in the most self-interested way, what have we got to lose?"
Elizabeth Griffin
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