A still from the moviePicture this. You are an asylum-seeker, forced to travel in a crammed vehicle, where one’s foot is almost inside another person’s mouth. Bad luck if you are skinny, ‘sticks’ go straight into the boot of the vehicle.
The opening film Raftan/Parting, directed by Navid Mahmoudi, depicts the life and miseries of migrants at a time when refugee crisis is an everyday story.
While documenting migration, we often tend to forget that behind the statistics and numbers, there are human beings, just like Nabi and Fereshteh, the two young Afghans portrayed in the film.
The film opens with Nabi struggling to understand the instructions from a smuggler who has agreed to take him to Iran, from there to Turkey, and then to Europe.
Shot in a cinema-verite style, the director peeks through the windows, small holes put for the people in the boot to breathe, and doorways.
Nabi and Fereshteh decide to cross the border illegally to reach an imaginary land of hope. But, it’s no mean task and the couple submits themselves to a host of hurdles.
Nabi’s plans go awry and he is taken aback by a series of unfortunate events, including a mass drowning after smugglers crammed thousands of migrants on a boat.
Through the movie, the director makes his audience look at a dauntingly huge topic of global import – the refugee crisisThe frantic journey of the lovers ends up in a tragedy and Nabi is in a dilemma. Unable to take a decision, he thinks of running away from Fereshteh as he fears that taking her along will be dangerous to her life.
Through the movie, the director makes his audience look at a dauntingly huge topic of global import – the refugee crisis – and showcases the lives of those who are forced to stay and the ones in transit, who are suffocated on mucky boats. They dream of a better tomorrow on the other side of the world, all the while knowing that their lives hang in the balance. All they want is a place to live where they can be happy and safe. But where is that unknown land? It’s a never-ending quest!
