Here is an insightful but perhaps over oblique Belgian documentary that sets itself an ambitious goal: to expose the hidden infrastructure of state coercion that supports European migration policy, even down to the point of using reductive language such as “immigrant”. It arrives at these abstractions via the horrific story of the 2018 killing of Mawda Shawri, a two-year-old German-born Iraqi Kurd shot during a bungled border control raid on the van she was travelling in with her parents.
Director Robin Vanbiesen reveals this tragedy through documents and testimony read out for the audience of activists seen here. The infant’s body is dumped in a bin bag by the presiding officers, and her parents, Phrast and Shamden, refused access; the lies of the police, who played to the myth of immigrant barbarity by claiming Mawda had been thrown on to the highway by her fellow passengers; the justice system closing ranks by putting the onus of responsibility on the van driver for dangerous conduct that supposedly forced the police officer to fire.
Outrage is obviously the correct response. But, as someone points out here, concentrating on such egregious incidents plays into the authorities’ hands, because they are the outlying exceptions often then used to justify draconian control. They obscure the broader machinery of repression, and the underlying power ideologies, which license the empowered to pull the trigger. Another commentator makes comparisons with the anthropology of hunting: the mythology that differentiates hunter and prey and sanctions bloodshed. Dismantling violence means dismantling language; replacing labels such as “migrant” or “refugee” leads another participant to realise that searching for alternative terms invariably humanises the people concerned.
It doesn’t feel, though, as if Vanbiesen quite finds his own lexicon for the visual element of this revolution. His distorted sequences of Belgian highways, as if on-ramping into 2001’s Stargate, aren’t a bad attempt at conveying interstitial alienation – but the many, many inserts of fluttering roadside vegetation and lamp-posts eventually pale. Lyrically dwelling in this no man’s land while anonymously conveying its insights through staged readings, the film – ironically – starts to feel deracinated and dispersed. Fully attributed testimony and a rigorous conclusion for Mawda’s story, rather than a healing session of throat-singing, might have closed the loop better. The radical intent is clear to see, but the anger feels scattered by the wayside.
• Hold on to Her is on True Story from 6 February.
