Director: Lina Luzyte (Germany). Year of Release: 2022
The now sadly familiar image of a small boat bobbing up and down in the ocean, full to the brim with people. Every time it comes close to a wave, you’re not sure whether it will capsize. The boat eventually docks to a welcoming committee of people shouting “Go!” in broken English. Captions tell us that in 2020 the EU refused to take in any more refugees. A temporary camp was built in Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos for 2,500 people. It currently houses 13,000.
In the refugee camp, we see an older man approached by someone who asks how he is. “Terrible”, he says. “My appeal for asylum was rejected today”. The man then goes on at length about the sacrifices that he and his family have made to get there: “we came to Europe because we wanted progress, but we landed in the Stone Age”. Threatening to kill himself, he holds his head in grief and bursts into tears as he stumbles down the dusty road,
Suddenly, the man who was asking him questions berates him for not crying properly. Afghani director Talib Shah Hossaini escaped his homeland after he made a satirical film criticising the Taliban. He now lives in Moria with his wife and 3 girls. While he is waiting for his asylum claim to be processed, he is making a fictional film about life in the camp, starring refugees including himself and his family. The aim is to make the world stop turning away from their tragedy.
Picknick in Moria contains different layers of information. Sometimes Lina Luzyte shows the everyday life of refugees who have not had a mattress or pillow for months and live in tents with very rudimentary toilets and showers. They spend most of their time waiting. Sympathetic lawyers sometimes visit to give them advice as to how to make their asylum claims. Above all, they must prove that they would be in danger if sent back to any part of their home country.
But while all this is going on, we watch Hossaini prepping his actors, insisting that they show more emotion. Towards the end, we see scenes starring his very young daughters. One, who cannot swim, is supposed to feign drowning. The other calls out for help, but sometimes she shouts before her sister has entered the water. As Hossaini watches the young girls, he gets increasingly irate that their level of acting does not meet up to his high standards. It is not a good look.
At this point, the film works well as drama but not at all as a political argument. Here is a plea to treat refugees as people who deserve more help, but whose main character is being a bit of a dick (a lot of a dick) towards his own daughters. I guess that there’s some method in all the madness. Typically, films about refugees treat them as victims who need to be patronised by Western benevolence. At least Hossaini has agency, even if he doesn’t always use it well.
Hossaini was a talented film maker long before he fled. He makes an eloquent plea that many refugees are not just menial workers. This is a double edged tactic which plays on Western liberals’ patronising dismissal of the value of menial workers. It’s arguable whether Hossaini’s wife – who used to run a beauty salon – contributed more to society. But even people who run beauty salons deserve to be treated with more human decency than is offered to anyone on Moria.
This is a film which righteously extols the dignity of the people enduring cramped living conditions on Moria. Yet some of its artistic decisions undermine this political message. When Hossaini orders his actor to cry a little more convincingly, this is interesting on an artistic level – exactly how much truth are we experiencing and what is being staged for our benefit? At the same time, it sustains common narratives that refugees are faking the seriousness of their situation.
I think that we need to differentiate between what Picknick in Moria is trying to do and how successful it is at achieving its aims. In times like these, when the EU tightens up its asylum laws and at least 79 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean only yesterday, we need films like this. Merely the fact that it exists is a step forwards as it humanizes and makes visibie a group which is probably the most discriminated against in modern Europe.
And yet, the film suffers from never being quite clear if it wants to be a drama or a shout for justice. This is most clear when the refugee camp is twice attacked by racist arsonists. Although the arson attacks take place for two days, we only really see them in the background – as a haze of red while panicking refugees run away. This makes perfect sense for a film which wants to show both the human tragedy and agency of the inhabitants of the refugee camp. Politically, I’m not so sure.
I’m not certain it was an editorial decision to leave the arson attacks in the background – it could have been that the people making the film were just not there at the right time. But assuming that the film deliberately chose to focus on the everyday life of the refugees, and not to directly confront the murderous attack, the effect that it has is sanitising. We don’t get the surge of shock of an angry mob attacking the only home of people who have fled danger, only it’s after effects.
The film has a final limitation – although it does name names, and clearly blames the EU’s barbaric asylum laws for what we see, it only does this in a hushed voice. It is great that we are invited to see people like Hossaini as living, breathing individuals, but what are we supposed to do with this information? Feel bad? Send charity donations which don’t make a dent on solving the problem? The film is outraged, but seems unable to channel this emotion into any real rage.
Picknick in Moria is on the right side, but it’s just not angry enough. It moves us to tears when it should be moving us to storming EU buildings. It’s a start, but we need to go much further.
CinePhil 