EUROPE

Directed by Haider Rashid

Genre: drama – 2021

A film with:

• Adam Ali
• Svetla Yancheva
• Pietro Ciciriello
• Mohamed Zouaoui
• Michael Sega

A MULTI-SENSORY JOURNEY THAT IMMERSES THE SPECTATOR IN THE CONCRETE EXPERIENCE OF MIGRATION

An Iraqi boy tries to cross the border between Turkey and Bulgaria to reach Europe, but is immediately stopped by those border police forces who often join forces with organized crime. So the boy runs away through the woods, trying to stay alive.

Europa , written and directed by the son of an Iraqi immigrant and an Italian mother, tells the experience of migration by making us experience at a multi-sensory level what it means to face that journey, not in the abstract but in the immediate concreteness of the here and now: as every day to migrants.

Haider Rashid eliminates any distance between the spectator and its protagonist by throwing ourselves into an immersive epidermal experience: we feel the heat, the hunger, the tiredness, and above all the terror as the boy who is reduced to feeding on berries and eggs found by chance warns them, with the sole of the shoes cut in half and the wounds inflicted by nature and men. Enemies suddenly appear before his eyes and ours, and they are enemies without identity, armed bodies without names.

Even the corpses he encounters along his path appear surprisingly, constant memento mori for a boy who goes on with only the strength of despair. Perhaps the most alienating encounter remains the one with a woman who loads the boy into the car talking to him in an unknown language and reacts to him with a mixture of empathy and horror.

Cinematographically, the experience of Europa is reminiscent of Garage Olimpo or The Son of Saul : an obstacle course through hell that we perceive with all five senses.

It is almost a silent film, except for the sounds of the protagonist’s labored breathing and the shots that occasionally pierce the silence of the woods. The protagonist, despite his naivete , is credible and arouses instant empathy, both for his young age and for the condition of total estrangement in which he finds himself, which Rashid urges us to share through a direction constantly adhering to the moment and stuck to his character.

EVENT BONUS

Before the film, the short “ Terapia agile ” by Bruno Ugioli will be screened.

In collaboration with the OFF SCREEN Association.

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