IN THIS WORLD
by Chris Dashiell

There are over 14 million refugees in the world. With the seemingly endless succession of wars, and the resulting disruption and displacement, such numbers might seem commonplace. In This World, a new film by Michael Winterbottom, gives the numbers a name and a face, making them real for us in a way that no speech or lecture could ever accomplish.

Two Afghanis, 20-year old Enayat and 13-year old Jamal, decide, with the help of their families, to leave the refugee camp where they live in Pakistan, and try to get to London. Their arduous journey by truck, car, bus, ship, and freight container, is filled with peril. At every border and checkpoint they could be caught. They're never sure whether to trust the next contact on their way, and each new country - Iran, Turkey, Italy - presents new barriers of language.

Winterbottom has become one of the most versatile directors working today, doing everything from literary adaptations to the recent punk rock chronicle 24-Hour Party People. Working on a bigger canvas, he's crafted a fictional framework for a documentary subject. The hand-held DV allows him to photograph his protagonists in real street scenes, crowds, and marketplaces. In This World was only sketchily scripted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni -- the two main characters are played by actual Afghani refugees who made up their own dialogue. The style is rigorously observant and naturalistic. By the end of the film you've been made to experience, to some degree, what it's really like to be going through this.

Haunting music by Dario Marianelli drifts in and out of the movie, creating a multilayered effect, projecting the inward emotional journey (with its inherently fictional form) onto the outward voyage. In a brilliant sequence at the Iran-Turkey border, night vision photography conveys a feeling of primal exertion and fear. Steadily building in intensity, the film miraculously bridges the gap between viewer and subject. The young men's exhausting travels, on one long forbidding road after another, take on the quality of real time experienced, precisely because Winterbottom so expertly compresses the actual time of the film's events while avoiding dramatic emphasis. It's a breathtaking balance between the impartial distance of a documentary approach, and the intense engagement with two characters who are playing themselves.

The film has many revealing moments. Inevitably, as the director has said, the general story became the story of these two particular people. Jamal tells little amusing stories to keep their spirits up. Enayat is constantly suspicious of each person helping them, the vulnerability and powerlessness of his position reflected in his sensitive eyes. There comes a time when Jamal, faced with being stuck penniless in a dead-end city, chooses to steal someone's handbag, and we feel the wrongness and the necessity of his act at the same time. The film's respect for the way people really behave evokes no bitterness or irony -- this is a work of unconditional compassion and commitment, a straight-on gaze into our humanity.

There's no question that the movie has a political intent. The very nature of the subject -- refugees sneaking across borders, illegal immigrants looking for a better life -- elicits social and political thought. But the form, the style, despite an occasional drily informative narration accompanied by animated maps of the character's progress across the globe, presents no arguments or generalizations. Winterbottom simply shows us how it really would be for someone to undertake such a long and desperate journey. His method and sensibility are so fluid and open that we come to feel this reality more immediately than would seem possible in a film.

This willingness to let circumstances influence the filming, even to allow monotony a role (just as it has a role in the experience of the refugees), makes the fictional structure, and the emotional underlining, much more effective. When a crisis comes in the story, it carries the fateful power of reality. In This World's tremendously moving conclusion creates a vital connection, without any words, letting us see the sacredness of each life, causing us to recognize what we have known before but perhaps have forgotten -- that it is only an accident of birth that makes our path different from these young men. In the same moment, the conviction arises, wordless as well, that we must believe in something new and different, something greater and more potent than anger, and that this means working, somehow, for fundamental change in this world.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene