The hard truth about immigration
While the contentious issue of migration continues to divide communities around the world, two documentaries try to find a way to get to the heart of the matter. James Belfield writes.
The main reason that migration is such a significant, emotive and divisive issue is that we’re conditioned to view it through our own experience.
For example, I’m an immigrantby-choice, who upped sticks from the north of England and settled in New Zealand on little more than a whim and childhood recollections of Rotorua’s bubbling mud pools shown on Blue Peter. Borders simply don’t matter that much to me.
On the other hand, my grandmother’s views on borders and nationality – tempered by a very different era of world wars and the lingering ghost of Empire – was built on the sanctity of knowing the edges of nationalities were firmly marked (and fought over) on maps.
It’s telling that her views changed markedly on being introduced to the Indian doctor who would treat my grandfather’s cancer. Suddenly, this man’s decision to practise medicine thousands of kilometres from his place of birth meant something to her personally. It was now a good thing.
For those in coastal communities around the Mediterranean currently having to cope with flimsy boat loads of refugees fleeing wars and persecution in Africa and the Middle East, immigration brings with it real, immediate, personal issues.
So when the makers of documentary It Will Be Chaos visited the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013 to record the aftermath of the sinking of a refugee boat that left more than 360 men, women and children dead, they found no simple, unified response.
The Colapinto family of fishermen, who rescued 18 from the water, weep for those they couldn’t save. Mayor Giusi Nicolini urges a reporter not to consider the asylum seekers as ‘‘illegals’’ (‘‘words matter,’’ she states bluntly) before local authorities step in to brand them just that – illegal immigrants.
A cobbler mends a snapped, frail shoe for a Somalian girl before bemoaning that Italians are going hungry because of the influx of migrants.
And 600km away in Falerna, protesters march and chant about the ‘‘invasion’’ of African and Middle Eastern refugees.
The real impact of husband-andwife film-makers Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo’s film is that there’s no pre-emptory narrative, no soft-toned voiceover.
The coffins being unloaded in Lampedusa’s disorderly docks speak as loudly as Eritrean exsoldier Aregai, who lost relatives and friends on the ill-fated voyage from Libya, and hyper-anxious Syrian Wael Orfahli, who’s waiting in Turkey for smugglers to find his family a similarly dangerous boatride to the relative safety of mainland Europe.
The mainstay of the film is the interwoven stories of Aregai and the Orfahlis as they make their way to asylum in, respectively, Sweden and Germany.
But the supporting characters are not the usual political talking heads, they’re the refugees themselves and those they come across on their tortuous journeys.
By showing all sides to this sobering story and all the minutiae of the bedlam that swirls around Europe’s refugees crisis, the documentary succeeds in that most elusive of tones when it comes to talking about immigration: impartiality.
Sam Neill’s new doco series Uncharted aims for a similar goal when it comes to the issue of migration in the South Pacific – focusing on Captain James Cook’s three late18th century Endeavour voyages.
Neill, who gets a writer’s credit for the series, knows he’s steering into potentially choppy seas.
He told Stuff last week, ‘‘There’s going to be hardly a minute in the whole series where someone isn’t going to take offence’’) by telling ‘‘Cook’s story from both sides of the beach’’.
But his naturally grizzled and honest storytelling succeeds in a kind of equality of offence
– week one sees him in Tahiti blaming white, Christian settlers for ‘‘cultural vandalism’’ while wryly dismissing a resurgence of ancient Polynesian beliefs as ‘‘harmless’’ and, in part, ‘‘just made up’’.
His style is the polar opposite of It Will Be Chaos and he’s unafraid to talk straight into his camera phone or fail to contain his own emotional response to interviews, experiences or places.
He refuses to fall in behind the monochrome, heroes-and-villains version of South Pacific history.
Instead, he focuses on colonialism’s direct impact on everyday Polynesians and tries to investigate the motivations behind what seem to be a succession of fallible historical figures.
In doing so, Neill manages to make Uncharted into a wonderful tapestry of others’ exploits, experiences and adventures.
It Will Be Chaos screens on Monday at 10.30pm on Soho. Uncharted is on Prime tomorrow at 8.30pm.