15/07/2021 - CANNES 2021: Armed with a thriller-like pace, Haider Rashid’s film plunges the viewer into the living nightmare of a hunted immigrant on the border between Turkey and Bulgaria

“Go back. No Europe!” These words perfectly summarise the “immigration issue”, and they’re also the commands which are hurled at Kamal, a young Iraqi man who is trying to cross the Turkish-Bulgarian border, in Haider Rashid’s Europa [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Presented in Cannes, within the Directors’ Fortnight line-up, the movie sees this young man played by Lebanese-British actor-director Adam Ali stumbling through the forest for three whole days, trying to escape local mercenaries who hunt immigrants as if they’re wild boar.

The film opens with one of those infamous people traffickers (Mohamed Zouaoui) who help immigrants make their way towards Europe in exchange for exorbitant sums of money. The group in which our protagonist finds himself immediately falls into a trap set by the border patrol, and scatters. Thus begins a frenetic race towards freedom, which will almost last for the full 75 minutes of the film. As explained by the director in a lengthy caption in the film’s opening frames, the arrival of migrants in Europe is managed by criminal organisations who operate in league with border police forces and high-ranking government officials. Immigrants seeking dignity and salvation regularly suffer abuse and intimidation at the hands of law enforcement officers, who force them back across the border. The forests along these confines are also patrolled by organised groups of armed, local nationalists who call themselves “immigrant hunters”. Women and men risk death every day as they attempt to build themselves a new life.

Whilst the film seems most closely related to Michael Winterbottom’s Golden Bear-winning, 2002 title In This World, the directorial approach adopted by Rashid is considerably different, lending Europa a thriller’s pace and forcing the viewer to follow every heartbeat and laboured breath of the young man on the run. The task of sound engineer Giandomenico Petilllo and of sound designer Gabriele Fasano is to bullishly convey the sounds of helicopters, the rustling and snapping of branches and Kamal’s muffled groans, while Jacopo Maria Caramella’s crystalline photography homes in on our protagonist’s fear-dilated eyes, the vivid, chlorophyll hell that surrounds him, his open wounds… And we can almost smell the adrenaline emitted by Kamal’s body. When he finds himself fighting for his life with an armed man, the balaclava worn by the latter slips off to reveal a blond boy who can be no more than twenty years old. Together, the boy dressed in his fatigues and Kamal wearing the shirt of Egyptian football star and Liverpool centre-fielder Mohamed Salah, they’re the living embodiment of the senselessness of this “clash of civilisations”.

Haider Rashid was born in Florence to an Iraqi father and an Italian mother, and his documentaries and shorts often tackle the theme of identity vis-à-vis second-generation immigrants. His previous fiction film It’s About to Rain [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2013) was the first Italian film to explore the “Lus Soli” citizenship laws, while No Borders (2016) was the first Italian documentary created in virtual reality form. Written by the director alongside Sonia Giannetto (who also plays the role of co-editor), Europa is a film-testimonial which keeps the audience on the edge of their seats; it’s as necessary as a school text, born, as it is, out of stories about real people who cross the Mediterranean or forests in search of freedom. As the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Naguib Mahfouz wrote, “home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease”.

Europa is a co-production between Italy and Kuwait, courtesy of Radical Plans together with Beyond Dreams and Fair Play. International sales are entrusted to MPM Premium.

(Translated from Italian)