From Transitions 1, An interview with Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen about his film; `Promised
Land’
Graffiti
taken in 'the Palestinian Squat' where
Reza and Nima lived
The
following is by the editor in conversation with Nikolaj about his film
The waters might not part for immigrants as they did for
Moses, but still the Channel is there to be crossed. Asylum seekers will flee
violent regimes and, it seems, they love England, the country we sometimes love
to hate. Why? Because they’ve heard – and this isn’t just relatively speaking -
its politically stable and prosperous. “Because everyone has work and a roof
over their head”, “Because life there is good” , “The people are good” ,
“England is the number one country for human beings”, as some of the
individuals in Larsen’s Promised Land say.
Do we, often deficient with our
welcomes, not quake with shame? Coming as we do from this relative stability
and prosperity, even during recession, our journeying to a Promised Land might
entail travelling to the place of our dreams: a Himalayan mountain, a Greek island
or a wall rife with ancient history. Not so for those fleeing war-torn
countries to escape devastation and torture, and yes that would amount to a
better life for them. Haven’t we who already possess this fundamental, always
sought and expected the same, our ideals no different from theirs?
Larsen’s hypnotically beautiful film commissioned for the
Triennial portrays the hope of refugees on the last leg of their flight from
their own countries as they wait in Calais to cross to their Promised Land.
Living with them in Calais’ Iranian
camps or the Afghan jungle, he and cinematographer, Jonas
Mortensen have earned their trust and the resulting piece, no quick-storied
news item, is a perfectly observed narrative which is not a drama. Although his
protagonists have come from lands where the authorities pull out their nails,
chop off their fingers or poke out their eyes - and these brutalities make the
French police’s beatings look laughable by comparison - Larsen doesn’t dwell on traumas or intrude on
the introverted or seriously depressed.
Mostly
from Iran or Afghanistan, those who have come forward - Reza and Nima, Kamron,
Khan, Hasam, Jafar or Mohammed – are intrepid and often audacious questors with
a quiet but resolute pride. Despite extortionists demanding money for their
illegal human trafficking organisations,
they’ve not yet - unlike second generation immigrants - experienced
disillusion, the flip side to hope, and still it is hope rather than misery
that fuels what Larsen describes as their incredible strength.
Yes he admits there is tragedy and sadness and yes, what
they are doing is illegal. But to have had lives so desperate they find
themselves propelled on an epic journey to better it, believing so strongly in
a destination they cannot know, is, he finds, fascinating. What a gamble. What
a life changing adventure. How would we western Europeans cope in the same
situation?
Despite the rawness of their living
rough, we, the audience, are treated to a feast of sight and sound, set out
triptych style across three screens. Flocks of migratory birds swarm like flies
across the sky. A lone seagull flaps its wings rhythmically through the air. A
father and son whose faces we cannot see cook and warm their hands over a fire on
the floors of a ruin. We listen to his words. A highway of lorries and lights
move slowly and hugely through the dark.
The sounds of the docks and vehicles around us are so close we might be
there, in danger even of being run over. But the sweeping complexes of roads
and flyovers are almost elegant and soon the soundtrack lifts to something
hauntingly melodic and ethereal. Sometimes the sea glitters. Sometimes grey
waves roll in. Monumental ships pass dignified across the setting sun. The legendary stuff both of sea-gods and
monstrous trials.
Poised on the double-edged poignancy and power of these
images we’re sucked in, teetering in our awareness between the critical
everyday of these would be survivors, ‘hanging-out’ in Calais’ parks, and their
larger fate. The first is in the detail of day to day survival, of
deliberations and focuses. The ‘how to’ questions and rehearsals concerned with
getting across that Channel, from Calais to Dover, whatever it takes.
How often does the Euro tunnel parking lot guard switch?
How will they avoid detection once inside the
lorries?
How will Hasan manage to cross the
Channel if he can’t swim?
The second is
the possibility always, of transcendence. Reza and Nima. Kamron. Khan. Hasam. Jafar or Mohammed. Glistening
waters. Rolling waves. Huge seas, real and metaphorical, waiting to be crossed.
The universal side to their stories says Larsen is the most tantalising. Love,
war, disillusionment and danger, the monumental themes, are all there speaking
to us all of dreams of utopia. Of moving on or away.
Are the men with this resolve and strength, heroes? With the dividing
line between victim and hero slight, Larsen erring on the side of the latter,
thinks they are. An Afghan family selling their house or shop to send their
eldest son far away to work and send back his wages, imbues him with great
responsibility. He is in a sense their Chosen One. But the hero is also anyone
setting out on a journey through hostile communities, across mountains, deserts
and parched wildernesses to the very edges of the seas. It takes guts. And if our Reza and Nima, Kamron, Khan,
Hasam, Jafar or Mohammed’s stories contain shades of the mythic sea-crossings -
Odysseus returning home or Jason looking for his fleece – it seems the gods who
protect their vessels and set their course were, as usual, sometimes there and
sometimes not.
Rebelling against
Iran’s current political climate Reza had fled with his young son Nima to the
mountains where they lived in hiding for six months. Unusually, his wife asked
him for a divorce. Then he had to run
again. The small boat that took them to Greece carrying eleven people filled up
with water because it was too heavy. Still they made it to Italy, then Germany
and Amsterdam where Reza bought a bus ticket to London but got stopped in
Calais.
Kamron, a
nineteen year old living in the Afghan jungle (makeshift camp), thinks that all
Afghans would return to their own country if war ended. He believes that other
people think that he’s a terrorist. Mostly they ‘hate us’, he says. He too
talked of a Turkey to Greece speedboat which crashed killing twenty four of his
countrymen.
Like Leander who
swum the Hellespont to reach his love, Hasan from Iran has something of the
lover’s ardour about him but lacks Leander’s ability to swim, and it is not
towards his love he is moving but away. In Iran he had everything. Money,
security, work, but the woman he loved married someone else. Now he says, he
has nothing. In Calais he found himself a cabin unknown to the police, and
while he watches his friends swim to ships that will take them to Dover, he has
tried and failed, even with a life-jacket, eight times. Perhaps his very
personal journey was to come to terms with and maybe overcome his grief. And
perhaps it occurred in the cabin. “It is like a hotel” he laughs. He has been
in Calais for forty days. “Life is easy here”,“Quite hard to leave really! ”,
he says.
So have the
courageous been rewarded? As far as Larsen knows, Reza is repairing computers in Wales where
he’s living with his son. Jafar finally got to England after attempting the
crossing twelve times. Now he is in police custody. Mohammed is attending
English classes and has joined a gym in a city in Scotland. He is lonely. Even
the best results don’t have unequivocally happy endings.
As the P&O ferry passes the setting sun, Hasan is left on his own.
Perhaps it’s just as well. He has an inkling of our legacy for he has been told
that he would feel very alone if he were to make it to England. He has had
friends in Calais but in England he would be lonely he repeats. As he couldn’t
cross to his love, luckily, unlike Leander, he didn’t drown. Instead Hasan has
returned to Iran.
We can hardly compare our immigrant heroes to the slaves
who escaped from Egypt or even the survivors from a flattened Troy who went out
to form new cities like Rome or Troynovant (an old name for London), can we?
Larsen, himself a Danish migrant attracted by the energetic metropolis of
London replies ‘we don’t know yet’. His reasons for leaving his own provincial
home town aren’t the same as an Afghan’s who’s travelled the length of Turkey,
Greece, Italy, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany … to
France. But a quest is a quest. No matter he had to wash dishes. He was in the
country that was not so much a safe haven to him as a cultural idol. Yet he,
like his protagonists, once left home in order perhaps like Odysseus, to seek
it again.
We can all claim
quests of our own. So at the very least, because in ‘enlightened self-interest’
welcomes are reciprocal, we should match the boldness of wave-making voyagers
for whom England beckons, by helping them feel at home. Every culture is a mixed bag of races
enriched by diasporas. Nikolaj’s work of art clothes the individuals who
inspired by hope would roll up on our shores, in a gentle but insistent
humanity.
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