"That's a misleadingly linear description of the film; it's actually cleaved into two parts which would seem back to front if we were following the stories of specific people. The first section observes life in the squat where the residents support each other as they face eviction threats and the bureaucracy of asylum-seeking, while the second part looks on as other people make the rough sea passage."
"All that might make this sound like any number of 21st-century documentaries (Fire at Sea, for instance) and dramas (Io Capitano) about immigrants crossing continents with deadly results. But this one is aggressively non-narrative, composed of a series of long static shots and still images that linger many beats longer than might seem necessary to get the point across. Body parts and faces, what looks like a fuse box, a child being delivered by a rough emergency C-section (gory stuff, be warned),"
An Egyptian-American film-maker spent four years filming African and South Asian migrants traveling through Libya and across the Mediterranean to a Parisian squat. The film splits into two parts: one showing life in the squat as residents face eviction threats and asylum bureaucracy, the other documenting sea crossings and time aboard rescue boats run by organisations such as Doctors Without Borders. The work is aggressively non-narrative, composed of long static shots, still images, low-lit scenes and a punchy score by Bertrand Bonello. The raw, unexplained imagery includes medical emergencies and scattered body parts. The 159-minute runtime and lack of clear structure hinder empathy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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