Et nous jetterons la mer derrière vous

With the Oriental custom of scattering water behind someone leaving a house as a sign of good health, four filmmakers create a metaphor of an exile that is both told as a long-term adventure and experienced as a sign of the world’s deep malfunctioning. Aziz, Sidiqi, Housine and Younes left knowing full well the proverb “the grass is greener on the other side”; their families warned them about some of the dangers, relatives have even lost their life trying to emigrate. Their crossed portraits in places where their journey sometimes came to an abrupt end lead to incursions into border zones whose name we may have heard without being able to imagine the surrounding landscape. Lesvos Island in Greece, near the Turkish coast, Patras port, the departure point for trucks going to Italy, or the detention centres in Athens and Istanbul: all entry points into Europe that have become increasingly locked down, changing these spaces into “non-spaces”: places of anonymous and even illegal flows, and which no one can make their home. By focusing on the technical and topographical details of these migrants’ stories, the film counterbalances this trend towards anonymity: we find that there is no longer anything strange about its protagonists. (Charlotte Garson)