In your film, you explore European borders under their most violent, arbitrary and subtle aspects. Could you share the research that guided you when making the film?
First, there was the desire to go see this Eastern part of Europe when we learned that the border guards of the continent, with the help of Frontex, were engaging in a migrant hunt under the pretext that they had acted as “destabilization weapons” from dictator Lukashenko. We arrived in Poland in March 2022 for location scouting. Putin’s colonial war against the Ukrainian people having started on February 24, it was hard to ignore this reality. In the film, these two contexts blend, but it was necessary to maintain the primary intuition: telling the present from a non-European point of view, of a Hazara narrator, a people from Afghanistan that suffers discrimination, which has intensified since 2021 with the return of the Taliban. So this film is a long-time work on the period from 2021 until today, without necessarily respecting the chronology and sometimes going “backwards”…
In the film, you use found footage as well as footage filmed on “that side” of the European border, the latter feeling like a reaction, a response to these images of violence filmed at the border between Belarus and Poland. How did you develop these different images in the process of making the film?
For a very long time after the shoot, I wanted to give a counterpoint to the footage shot in Warsaw and Białowieża because it explored the facade and surface of what we were seeing, without reporting on the hidden side of this border. Then, on YouTube, I found direct or indirect testimonies of the journey undertaken by migrants of Afghan, Kurd, Iraqi, etc., origin—testimonies I wanted to use as fragments next to “my” footage. Some are from anonymous people documenting their journey, others from press agencies… It felt important to give a provisional land a breeding ground for this uprooted footage, surrendered to potential manipulation from the networks.
The film’s narrator is Ahura Ehsas, poet and filmmaker, and the language of his voice is Dari, one of the languages of Afghanistan. Could you tell us about this choice as well as the collaboration with Ehsas?
At a certain point when editing I imaged a collaboration, for the voice over, with someone from Afghanistan whose course is similar to the situation of those who went through that border. I met Ahura during a shoot, and is personality felt propitious to a sound research around his voice, inhabited by musicality and melancholy. I wrote the voice over and had him translate it to Dari, getting inspired by our conversations, in order to double the distance it laid down, and for it to unfold a form of uprooted intimacy, going beyond the political blockade.
Interview by Margot Mecca
