IT STARTS WITH ‘IT STARTED WITH A KISS’.
As Hot Chocolate’s 1982 cheese-ballad hit plays through a cheap CD player, a woman with a perm and plaid skirt dances with a man with a moustache and a combover. Written in chalk on a blackboard behind them are the words: “Cultural Awareness! Sex: Is A Smile An Invitation?” A group of men — asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa — sit on plastic chairs, watching without expression. The woman and man are locked in a bizarre performative seduction, a kind of school assembly for adults, explaining Western sexual politics in the bluntest of terms. He grabs her behind. She slaps him away. The group of men just stare blankly.
This is the opening scene of Limbo, one of the strangest and most distinctive films you’re likely to see this year, in which, for the most part, nothing happens and nobody goes anywhere. It’s a film which manages to eke humour and pathos from the ongoing refugee crisis, while remaining respectful to its characters and subject matter, finding poignancy in the most peculiar of places. It’s a film which features a Freddie Mercury superfan from Afghanistan with a pet chicken, and a doctor who is only in his surgery once a month, “weather permitting”.
It tells the story of Omar, a musician from Syria, who finds himself sent to a remote island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides while he waits for word of his asylum application. We wait with him. Told through painterly vignettes, at once oddly hilarious and heartbreakingly sad, time seems to stop. “I’ve never, ever cried and laughed from reading a script,” says Amir Elmasry, who plays Omar, “until I read Limbo.”
But how did Scotland, Syria and a global humanitarian crisis form the basis of this summer’s most original comedy? Never thought — as Hot Chocolate once put it — it would come to this.
THE FIRST TIME THAT LIMBO’S Writerdirector, Ben Sharrock, tried to make a film about refugees, Al-qaeda got in the way. “In film school, we had a failed attempt at making a short film in the Saharawi refugee camps in southern Algeria,” Sharrock explains. “We went out there to work with an NGO [non-governmental organisation]. And then when we came to make the film, we couldn’t get the insurance from the university to go back out there, because it was too dangerous. Al-qaeda were operating in the area.”
The project was scrapped. But the impulse for making a similar film stuck around. Sharrock, who grew up in Edinburgh, might not seem like the most obvious person to tell a story about refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Yet his association with the area and the culture runs deep. ”It’s something that I’ve been interested in for such a long time,” he says. Sharrock studied Arabic at the University of Edinburgh (his tutor, Marwa Mouazen, served as a dialect coach on Limbo), and he spent the third year of his degree in Damascus, a year before the civil war broke out in Syria.
The experience was life-changing. “It was incredible,” Sharrock recalls. “It was part of my formative years, so it was a time that was so incredibly special to me. And Damascus itself was so beautiful. The thing that stood out was just how peaceful it was. I was the recipient of so much generosity from the people there.”
While there, Sharrock attended the Damascus International Film Festival, and
grew to love Middle Eastern filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Elia Suleiman. The latter, in particular was a huge influence on Sharrock, and a key piece to the Limbo puzzle. “When I watched Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, I was like, ‘I want to be a filmmaker!’” Sharrock says. Suleiman’s 2009 film, shot with his trademark detached style and Buster Keaton-esque sense of deadpan humour, depicted the violent founding of Israel. The filmmaker was once described in a review as “Wes Anderson... if he was born an Israeli/palestinian Christian Arab”.
“What stood out,” says Sharrock, “was how he could look at such a serious sociopolitical subject matter and treat it with this lightness of touch, and this undertone of absurdist humour, that helps us see the humanity of the characters.”
It lit a fire in Sharrock. If poker-faced comedy with a political twist could be made in the Middle East, could it come to Scotland too?
IF LIMBO SOUNDS LIKE A STRANGE proposition, it took a while to make sense to Sharrock too. ”I’m actually quite unsure of how long it took me to write the screenplay,” he says. “The way that I work is that I start with the subject matter. I started with this desire to tell a story about the refugee crisis, and then it took me a long time to really find the specific story that I wanted to tell.”
He had a sense it should take place somewhere remote, and initially pondered setting the film in a fishing village in Iceland, before considering somewhere a little closer to home. Some lo-fi location scouting — “Basically, I just looked on Google Maps” — eventually led him to the Scottish archipelago of Uist (population: 4,276). “I thought, ‘How have I not heard of Uist?’ Because it’s actually pretty big on the map.”
Entranced by its desolate landscape and its extreme remoteness (the nearest major city is almost 200 miles away), Sharrock spent several weeks on the Outer Hebridean islands to write his screenplay, holed up in a “peat-fired cottage with no Wifi”, searching for creative sparks. “I would write in the mornings and then I would drive around the island looking for locations in the afternoon, trying to think about what Omar would be thinking about — and also bumping into locals and having odd conversations.”
Sharrock’s initial encounter with the islands influenced some of the quirky details in the film, of the kind only to be found in rural Scotland — such as the world’s saddest-looking dolphin tour, or the sign in the supermarket that says, “Please refrain from urinating in the freezer.” But when the time came to start filming Limbo, the lure of Uist became more than just a stimulus for the writing process. Nowhere else, it seemed, could match its strange, stark beauty. “We went on a journey all over Scotland to find somewhere that would be more appropriate to shoot a film, on the mainland or on one of the other islands that were more accessible,” says Sharrock. “We just couldn’t find anywhere that had the same feeling as Uist. You know, Uist is very beautiful, but with the right weather, it’s also very bleak. And it feels vast. Because really what I was looking for is an island that could be a metaphor for purgatory.”
A FILM ABOUT EXPRESSIONLESS refugees in purgatory might seem like a hard sell. But Limbo proved surprisingly straightforward to pitch to the money men. “We were in a really advantageous position because of my previous film, Pikadero,”
explains Sharrock. Shot in northern Spain with “essentially zero budget”, Sharrock’s 2015 debut told the story of an unconventional romance, against the backdrop of the financial crisis. Though it never got a theatrical release in the UK, the film was hugely acclaimed by those who saw it. The Hollywood Reporter praised its “deft balance of the pessimistic and the playful”, and the film won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It also acted as a calling card for Sharrock’s style: absurdist jokes, understated performances, fixed cameras, careful compositions, thoughtful themes. Financiers looking for a sense of what Limbo might be had an example to go by. “We still had to go through a process to confirm public funding,” says Sharrock. “Particularly these public funders — rightly so — interrogating my right to make a film about refugees.” But it worked: a modest budget was built up.
A month of preparation ensued with the cast, which included El-masry as Omar, Vikash Bhai as his Queen-obsessed wannabe manager/agent Farhad, and Kwabena Ansah and Ola Orebiyi as two Nigerian brothers, Abedi and Wasef, who constantly bicker over whether Ross and Rachel from Friends were, indeed, on a break. Sharrock spent the time with his actors rehearsing, getting to grips with the film’s singular style, and meeting with real refugees.
“We were very fortunate to be welcomed into this young Syrian men’s group in Scotland,” remembers El-masry. “They were generous and brave in telling their stories. After spending some time with them, everything narrowed down — that this could happen to anybody.” One detail that struck the actor was how humour played an important role in the men’s lives. “This idea that you can laugh through your traumatic experiences is very reflective of the Arab culture. We tend to laugh at our woes. Quite similar to British humour, if you think about it.”
The prep time proved key. Limited budget meant limited filming days, and when the production finally made it to Uist in late 2018, Sharrock found himself in a constant war with Scottish weather. “It was incredibly challenging, all the way through,” he says. ”Every day was just an absolute battle against the island. It was really difficult to know whether we’d got it or not, because there was no time to think.” The notoriously temperamental Outer Hebrides climate meant sometimes there would be “six guys holding down lighting stands”, while a day filming on the beach saw Sharrock’s thick, Arctic explorer coat drenched. “It wasn’t raining. The wind was just whipping the water off the Atlantic. I just remember being completely soaked through.”
Bemused locals helped where they could; even if there were mild grumbles about the “single road track being clogged up with traffic”, many appeared in the film as extras. The sight of a film crew was likely fairly alien to them: Limbo holds the distinction of being the first film ever shot on Uist. “And it could well be the last,” notes Sharrock drily.
But the biggest challenge for the film was not the weather. The trickiest task lay in balancing Limbo’s eccentric, unique tone: the push and pull between the ridiculous and the profound. “It was at the forefront of everything that we did,” says Sharrock. “You can’t go too funny and you can’t go too dramatic. You can pivot either way, but you’re holding this line.”
Sharrock took a careful, considered, meticulous approach to every shot. Finding that balance was like a delicate chemistry experiment — too much of one element, and the entire mixture might be ruined. “Every tool that we had was interrogated to balance
that tone. Even the use of colour and the composition and the lens choice. Like, sometimes a hat would be too colourful. So then it would feel too absurd, and it would even be a case of taking the hat out and swapping it for something else — just to try to balance the feel of the composition.”
For the actors, it was a unique challenge too, working within an incredibly understated and nuanced world. “Ben would say, ‘We’re going to go Buster Keaton on this shot,’” recalls El-masry. “And I would just know, ‘Now’s the time to be very inward.’ It is a challenge, because, y’know, I gesticulate a lot! But he would just say, ‘Give me nothing. Just feel it.’”
The point, Sharrock explains, is that — especially when the camera is in an extreme close-up, “literally inches from his face” — the audience will register every subtle facial change, perhaps deeper than if the face was heavily emoting. “You can feel every little bit of emotion in him and really see deeply into his eyes,” Sharrock says. “You know if there’s an adjustment of performance. What I wanted to do with Limbo was try to push the boundaries of absurdist films — push the emotional range of deadpan.” He laughs. ”Which is a bit of a paradox to the idea of what being deadpan is.” But in the world of Limbo, there is plenty to be emotional about.
THERE WERE 35,099 ASYLUM applications in the UK in the year leading up to March 2020. For people escaping war or oppressive regimes, the route to resettlement can be brutal, hindered by a hostile environment and a hopelessly underfunded and heavily bureaucratic system. Those who survive the often deadly journey are met with antagonism and indifference. Life for an asylum seeker in this country is rarely funny.
But the stories of these people do not necessarily need to be told in a depressing realist drama. They can be just as authentic, and as powerful, in a strange, stylised comedy like Limbo. Everyone’s story contains multitudes. “It’s the Calpol effect,” Sharrock says. “Y’know, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. I feel like I can communicate the way that I’m looking at the world and the injustice that I see in the world through making films that have that mix of humour and absurdity and drama.”
Proof that this approach works can be found in how the film has resonated with those who have watched it. When it screened at the Zurich Film Festival, an asylum seeker in the audience stood up at the Q&A that followed. “He just said, ‘This was my life,’” recalls Sharrock. “‘This is what I went through.’ He almost broke down in tears. The auditorium just went completely silent.”
At another festival — the Cairo International Film Festival, where the film won three awards including Best Film — Elmasry recalls the audience being stunned that its director was a white Scotsman. “Everybody assumed that he was Middle Eastern! They had seen all the cultural references and thought it could only be from someone who really knows the culture.” At yet another festival, San Sebastian in northern Spain, one audience member somehow confused this hyperstylised, meticulously composed film for a documentary. “We took that as a compliment,” says El-masry, with a polite laugh.
It’s fairly clear to most that Limbo is a work of fiction. But in a world where reality is brutal and bleak, maybe an absurdist film in which nothing happens and nobody goes anywhere can offer more truth than reality ever could.