Director: Sherzad Ali
Writer: Sherzad Ali
Cast: Rogier van Veen, Linn Vandeborne, Sylwia Jędryczko
Running time: 22mins
It is hard to tell if Sherzad Ali is playing with stereotypes, or if they are playing with him. There is evidence to support either option in his drama Refuees – which presents a twist-ending that turns the audience’s expectations on their head, but only arrives at that point after serving up a gruelling 22 minutes of unironic clichés.
The film begins with establishing shots of a father (Rogier van Veen) waking his daughter (Linn Vandeborne) up in a desolate, snow-covered forest. As he says they must start walking again, the pair have apparently been toiling through the elements for days in the search for a camp where there is “no more killing” – and they are running short on supplies.
Rustling around in his satchel, which audibly only has one thing in it, the father finally manages to procure his final morsel: a loaf of bread. “Always remember, each tiny bite you take of this takes a day from your life” he explains in English, to his now-terrified daughter. Worse still, though, the last of their water is gone.
Strangely, this seems to bother the father less. While as a rule of thumb, the human body can go three weeks without food, death without hydration can occur in as little as three days. But having already petrified his daughter by suggesting that each bite of bread brings her death a little closer, suddenly the father is willing to revert to that tried and tested staple of survival films: tin-eared optimism. Now he insists the pair can make it through this, simply by being “strong”. This would no doubt be easier for his daughter to buy into, if he didn’t also happen to be dying from the world’s most aggressive case of consumption – from tickling cough to hacking up blood and death in the space of a couple of hours.
It is clear that Ali has drawn heavily from other survival-against-the-odds films to tell his own story – and as a student production, that is a perfectly acceptable tactic. But he does not seem to have considered how the tropes from the different sub-sections of the genre might clash with each other. For example, the grisled nihilism of the father from The Road is clearly an influence here, not only coughing himself to death, but also determinedly reminding his young child that this is a world where each decision you make could be your last. But this does not sit well with the influences drawn from the likes of La Vita e Bella – where a father helps his son to survive the Holocaust by tricking him into thinking they are living in a holiday camp. This contrast in styles means that the father in Ali’s script constantly undermines himself – reminding his daughter of the life-or-death battle they face one moment, jauntily putting on a brave face and pretending things are fine the next.
Yes, we might both die of starvation. But don’t worry about this cough, I’ll be just fine. No need to prepare for life without me, no sir.
Aside from the mismatch of survivalist clichés that the film draws from, there are also technical issues plaguing the story’s delivery. Chief among them is asking the performers to deliver their lines in English. It is a defensible decision from a practical standpoint, because, for a film written by a Turkish artist, performed by Dutch actors, in a field somewhere in Germany, it might have been a common language. But it does seem like the central characters struggled to put the necessary raw emotion behind their dialogue, while having to deliver lines in their second or third language. And as the writing is already a little hammy (some might even say mawkish), those performances only underscore that.
At the same time, it does not take Ray Mears to pick the scenario apart in terms of survivalism. Human beings in casual winter-wear cannot spend days sleeping in the snow. This is not in a makeshift shelter, or on a tarp, either. The opening scene finds father and daughter sleeping directly on the ground, where the melting snow beneath them would have soaked into their clothes, and they would have died of hypothermia in hours. Meanwhile, the water situation is not necessarily as desperate as portrayed either. Their canteen might be empty, but they spend the whole film standing in a field of frozen water – and while eating snow in its solid form can actually cause dehydration, melting it to drink in whatever you were carrying water in before is a perfectly good option.
Nit-picking aside, though, Ali manages to win back a lot of good will with the movie’s climax. In the film’s final shot, he turns all the assumptions tied to the tropes around refugees in films around. His script has purposefully avoided explaining which conflict these two characters are fleeing from – and where they are seeking safety. Viewers might have assumed that they were seeking safety from the war in Ukraine, or the Middle East – with Western Europe ‘naturally’ being the bastion of civilisation the rest of the world would want to escape to. But instead, the story serves up a reminder of how norms we take for granted now are fragile and recent, how the rest of the world supported Western Europe when the shoe was on the other foot, and how we desperately need to re-evaluate how we see ‘borders’ in a time of escalating violence.
There is some great potential in Sherzad Ali’s filmmaking – which is arguably all that matters for student films anyway. This project is driven by an innovative idea, that brings a forgotten chapter of history to life at a crucial moment in our modern times. It will start important conversations, even if it isn’t perfect. But that is as far as this particular project goes – because the stodgy dialogue, slow pacing and clichéd tropes which pad out the run-time mean the final product does not live up to the quality of the idea itself.
