July
Chapter Two: Homer, to Syria
08/02/2023
Shelter Without Shelter (2019)
93min | UK | English with English Subtitles
Director: Mark E Breeze & Tom Scott-Smith
Shelter without Shelter explores the great hopes and profound challenges of sheltering Syrian refugees across Europe and the Middle East since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. Filmed over three years beginning in 2015, this six-part documentary investigates how the war-forced migrants from Syria were sheltered, ending up in mega-camps, city squats, occupied airports, illegal settlements, requisitioned buildings, flat-pack structures, and enormous architect-designed reception centres. Using perspectives from humanitarians who created these shelters as well as from critics who campaigned against them, the documentary reveals the complex dilemmas and colossal failures involved in attempts to house refugees in emergency conditions. Based on innovative new research at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, Shelter without Shelter offers insights into a universal human experience. We all need shelter, but what is it? This film was chosen for its starting point – the wave of migration pushed by war that washed up countries around the Mediterranean and across Europe. How was this dealt with by those hosting migrants? Here we look at the new landscapes of homes, what those homes mean, and the questions we should be asking in order to tackle the issue without enabling the problem: violence. This film looks at spaces as the ultimate home of our basic need – starting from dignified privacy to basic biological needs.
15/02/2023
Central Airport THF (2015)
Director: Karim Ainouz
96min| Germany| German and Arabic with English Subtitles
Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport ceased operations in 2008 but reopened in 2015 as an emergency refugee camp. Tackling the refugee crisis in a brand-new way, director Karim Aïnouz (Madame Satã, Festival de Cannes 2003) covers a year of life at Templehof, capturing the day-to-day experiences and struggles of residents and aid workers with rare intimacy and empathy. Though the documentary is deeply humanistic, Aïnouz is also alert to the remarkable topography and unique architecture of the airport and the irony of its status as a holding place for people who have nowhere to go. Winner of the Amnesty International Film Prize at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival.
22/02/2023
Purple Sea (2020)
96min | Germany | Arabic with English subtitles
Director: Amel Alzakout & Khaled Abdulwahed
This ironically claustrophobic film mixes documentary footage with poetic narration and abstract imagery to tell the story of the fate of forty people who lost their lives at sea as they fled to a new future on a dingy. Among the survivors was filmmaker Amel Alzarkout, who shot this footage, captured by the GoPro strapped to her wrist. On one level, the film questions the idea of what landscape means in the context of border fluidity. What do these lines and definitions mean when people are pushed to the edge of a given space to survive – how do we then redraw those borders? Looking beyond that, we can ask what the meaning of the nation state is. But what we see here is a documentation of existence, what and where we have a right to live, and survive.
