In This World

With the boundaries between documentary and fiction constantly blurred, the film shows the desperate journey of two Afghanis migrants, the young cousins Jamal and Enayat, smuggled from Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to London. The two boys find themselves at the mercy of the people-smugglers who make their living out of others’ misery, as they pass Iran, Turkey, Italy, France. In This World is styled as a fictional documentary, using voice over narration and real refugees and locations (including the now infamous Sangatte camp). The cousins speak their own language, the movie is released in Pashtu and Farsi with subtitles, a choice to stress their displacement and the uneasiness of communication. “There is a world inside the world”. The film, shot on digital video with hundreds of hours of footage and built on two engrossing performances from the non-professional leads, was conceived before the events of September 11th which have given it an additional resonance, when, June 2000, 58 Chinese migrants died inside the back of a lorry while they were desperately trying to run away.