Afrin nel mondo sommerso
Directed by
In one of Bangladesh’s low-lying coastal areas along the Brahmaputra River, a 12-year-old orphan named Afrin lives on a flood-ravaged island with no electricity. Her relatives want to marry her off, which is illegal but common practice, but Afrin is unlike other girls, with plans of her own and a mind of her own. When her home is submerged by floodwaters, she decides to leave behind the only world she’s ever known and embark on a perilous solo boat journey to find the father she’s never met in one of the world’s most densely populated cities.
In Dhaka, filled with danger and mystery, Afrin faces the impossible, but she befriends a group of fellow orphans and never gives up hope of being reunited with her father and living a better life. A film that goes beyond the emergency of the climate crisis to tell an epic story of formation, resilience and survival, allowing us to enter the life and emotions of a resourceful teenager, capable of facing with hope and heroic determination one of the greatest threats to the existence of our species...
The film is inspired by my wife’s work in Southeast Asia, where she has been working on resilient shelters with locally available materials (bamboo) to reduce the devastating impact of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. The film project is based on my fieldwork experience during the flood season; what I narrate is confirmed and described with great precision by Afrin and other inhabitants of the char (alluvial sediment island in the Ganges Delta). Mighty Afrin shows how the “slow violence” that affects the poorest is accelerating as a result of recurring catastrophes around the world. At the same time, the film is a coming-of-age story of a young orphan girl living near a flooded river as she searches for her own identity and autonomy. While touching on contemporary issues of great social and global relevance such as women’s empowerment, human rights, climate justice, the film feels like a timeless Greek tragedy, set in contemporary Bangladesh. I believe that the narrative dimension of an epic journey can make the setting of a distant country more familiar and that the great determination and self-discovery of the young protagonist can be engaging beyond any cultural difference. Mighty Afrin is a detailed observation of the behavior of a poor orphan girl who comes of age in the context of an island of mud and floods. A journey into emotions against the backdrop of climate migrations, a story capable of engaging a younger audience eager to understand one of the main problems of contemporary times.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.