Egyptian-American film-maker Sam Abbas’s experimental documentary was made over four years and shows footage of African and South Asian immigrants making the treacherous journey up through Libya and across the Mediterranean to a Parisian squat. 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. Time is also spent aboard boats run by organisations such as Doctors Without Borders who seek to help the migrants.
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), someone’s phone showing text messages, water, sick people laid out like cordwood on a deck; it’s all a jumble of images, unexplained and raw, and sometimes barely visible in the low-lit conditions.
Meanwhile, a punchy, scratchy musical score composed by French film-maker Bertrand Bonello (The Beast) rankles away in the background, neither enhancing nor detracting from the images because they’re all so random. The lack of story, structure, or any clear editorial principle is a serious impediment to empathy for these poor, struggling people; the 159-minute runtime feels like four years. The highlight is a minute-long clip in the first section where a woman is seen bopping along to Oumou Sangaré’s delicious banger, Seya, offering one bright moment of joy.
• Europe’s New Faces is in UK and US cinemas from 12 December, and on digital platforms from 19 December.
