Illegal immigration is disconcertingly rebranded as a sort of Starvation/Squid Video games-esque problem by the teenage boys proven right here attempting to gatecrash Fortress Europe. “In fact, the sport is harmful. When you fall on a mountain, you'll die,” says SK, a 15-year-old who's fleeing Afghanistan. “When you move, you'll win. That’s why they name it the sport.” Slapping this pop-culture filter on the tough realities of globalisation provides this Dutch documentary a high-concept jolt, however essentially it's in all probability the one method for such younger minds to course of the traumatic enormity of what they're engaged in, and make mild of their very own vulnerability.
The distances concerned – with a few of these enjoying the “pedestrian recreation” strolling overland from Syria to the Balkans – are mind-boggling. However we're a era on from the rickety human-trafficking provide traces of Michael Winterbottom’s In This World; many of those migrants appear comparatively well-resourced, shopping for winter clothes and cellphones to interchange confiscated ones en route. In addition they appear to have the social-media reflex of documenting their journeys. Would-be bodybuilder and biology scholar SK, together with his shy Bollywood smile, hosts his personal vlogging-style segments from atop coal freight wagons and mine-strewn Croatian forests.
However this air of Twenty first-century self-empowerment is solely superficial. They trudge by snowy countryside at evening and fend off bears and wolves with DIY aerosol flamethrowers. Mustafa, a 17-year-old Iraqi, is overwhelmed and tortured by Croatian border police (who come over significantly badly – you marvel how complicit the EU is with their zero-tolerance stance). Typically shot in bleary evening imaginative and prescient or below sodium lights in interstitial border zones and camps, their ordeals linger with a near-hallucinatory energy. However with the testimony of 10 or so completely different migrants all intermingled, particular person journeys get subsumed – maybe deliberately – right into a collective portrait of “the sport”. In fact there are not any winners right here, even these of us with the luxurious of watching as world migrant numbers proceed to rise.
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