XENOS

In 2012, in A World Not Ours, Mahdi Fleifel, born in the Palestinian refugee camp, Ain el-Helweh, in the Lebanon, returned to film his friend Abu Eyad. A furtive but intense and sober plunge into an underground existence, Xenos bears the same stamp of intimacy. Abu Eyad is now blocked at the gates to Europe, in Athens, where he lives illegally behind a light well. Whereas Kaveh Bakhtiari’s Stop-Over (2013) chronicled the Athenian survival of another group of migrants depicting their trajectory through the lens of their itineraries, Xenos settles into a ductile, open-ended present. In Greece, a country “that ruins your soul”, “one month is a million years”. The recourse to drugs or prostitution is described by Abu Eyad with a dryness that contrasts with the words of his parents, who still live in the Lebanon and whose kindliness seems so ordinary that it appears all the more surreal: “find yourself a wife”, “find a job”. Without commentary and above all without judgement, Fleifel gathers these accounts almost from the inside, recalling the painful polysemy of the Greek word xenos: meaning “foreigner” but also “enemy”. (Charlotte Garson)