Putting faces to the millions who desperately need help
There are 68.5 million people in the world seeking safety and shelter after being forcibly displaced from their homes by famines, floods and wars. With more than double Canada’s population searching for a new place to call home, it’s hard to put faces, let alone names, to them. But for a while in 2015, we did.
There was a steady stream of images of exhausted women, crying children and even bodies of Syrians washing ashore in Greece.
Europeans and Canadians responded with generosity and humanity. But the world has moved on. “We’ve fallen out of fashion,” a Syrian woman bitterly says in the documentary Inside My Heart, produced by Frank Giustra and directed by Debra Kellner.
The title comes from what Zahra, a widow with four children desperately trying to get beyond Greece and further into Europe, told her youngest son. He didn’t die on the boat, she said, because she held him inside her heart.
The shots of the four families in the film are so close, the conversations so intimate that Kellner described her access as like being a butterfly on the wall.
The challenges of being homeless, stateless and unwanted are so overwhelming that a Vancouver-born filmmaker and her crew was the least of their concerns.
It’s impossible not to be drawn into their struggles over 2½ years. And that’s precisely why Giustra, a Vancouver philanthropist, funded the documentary.
He was profoundly affected by the plight of refugees ever since his first trip to Greece in 2015. Since then, he’s made many trips there and to refugee camps in the region.
Through his Radcliffe Foundation, Giustra has provided funds to local NGOs that tripled the amount of rescue equipment and refurbished an abandoned clothing factory to house 800 people. The factory/dorm was eventually closed by the Greek government. But Giustra says it was only after he had shamed it into providing proper apartments for the migrants.
Together with George Soros’ foundation, the United Nations and the Canadian government, Giustra is also helping export Canada’s model for refugee sponsorship that began in the 1970s as a response to the Vietnamese boat people.
For more than 40 years, groups of Canadians — individuals, church groups and others — have banded together and sponsored refugee families. And over the years, those families have been among our most successful new citizens. Six countries have already adopted it and 20 more are looking at it.
“When you see people up close and personal, hear their stories, see their horrendous living conditions and understand what they have given up, you get a sense of the humanity of this,” Giustra said in an interview.
“The purpose of this film is to give you the next best thing to seeing it for yourself. I can’t fly everybody over there. So, this is a great tool to bring that message across in way people can relate to … at the level of the heart.
“The crisis has moved off the headlines and yet it’s still there in spades and, in some ways, it’s worse.”
Kellner went with Giustra in 2015 to shoot both video and stills for the Radcliffe Foundation, the International Rescue Committee and the ClintonGiustra Foundation. Some of the people she focused on stayed in and she followed them on social media as they attempted to move north.
Nine-year-old twin girls from Afghanistan, Saghara and Sahar, “reached out big time,” said Kellner in an interview from Paris. The voluble and articulate twins invited her to visit them in Sweden and that trip was the genesis of the film.
Among the most poignant moments is when the twins’ new friend in Sweden — another girl from Afghanistan — tells them that her family’s application for asylum was denied after more than two years of waiting. They would have to go back to Afghanistan.
It’s one of the under-reported tragedies of the migrant crisis. With so much media attention on Syrians, countries responded by giving them priority. Migrants fleeing war and violence in other countries like Afghanistan have been bypassed.
What makes it worse is that soon after Kellner and Giustra made their first trip to Greece, doors began slamming across Europe, Asia and North America as nationalistic, fearmongering politicians fan xenophobia, demonize migrants as criminals, drug traffickers and rapists and threaten to unseat those like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have championed migrants’ plight.
“Europe is an illusion,” one of the mothers tells her husband in the documentary. In an attempt to dissuade him from trying one more time to get to Europe, she tells him that Europeans talk about democracy and human rights, but nobody cares about them.
Better, she said, to eke out a living in Turkey where at least they understand the language and the culture is closer to their own.
Canada is not immune to these hate waves. So far this year, 10,600 asylum seekers have arrived and both the federal Conservatives and Ontario’s new
When you see people up close and personal … and understand what they have given up, you get a sense of the humanity of this.
Tory premier, Doug Ford, are fanning fears that they’re making the housing crisis worse, stealing jobs and taking advantage of health care.
The message of Inside My Heart is an antidote, a cri de coeur that challenges us to be bold and generous to the millions who are human, just like us.