Laura’s hometown is near Madrid. She had, however, left Spain behind to find love and life in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When she returns for her sister’s wedding, she is the object of everyone’s envy — smart and prospering after having flown the nest. In the eyes of her kin, the future is not at home but elsewhere. But is it really?
Immigration is not pivotal to Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s new Spanish family thriller Everybody Knows. He doesn’t go deep into the recesses of history, nor does he cast an eye on how Argentina was shaped by mass European immigration. Yet Laura’s relocation to South America gives a specificity to the story, and is a talking point for the film’s characters, which helps ground the plot. It’s also a seemingly minor, throwaway detail that gains sonority in conjunction with the depiction of displacement and resettlement in contemporary world cinema at large.
Local geopolitics
Travel to any international film festival, such as Cannes, and apart from gender, sexuality and identity, it’s the theme of human movement and its aftermath that invariably catches the eye. Alongside a growing, compelling pool of queer narratives are the equally persuasive tales of exodus and migration; stemming from universal concerns and rooted in the geopolitics of the times.
So you have Michel Toesca’s French film Libre, about a farmer who questions French immigration laws and helps migrants in search of a better life while putting his own at risk. As conflict sets in, in the Damascus of 2011, expatriation to the U.S. is the alternative offered to the protagonist of Syrian filmmaker Gaya Jiji’s My Favourite Fabric . Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s black-and-white romance Cold War talks of people defecting and seeking asylum and political immunity during the Cold War. Nandita Das’ Manto is set against one of history’s largest episodes of human exodus, Partition, and zooms in on the tortured soul of a poet torn between two countries.
Largely, all exile tales are about misery and despair and the desperation to survive. They are about living on the margins, in hiding, on the sly. Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka is a harrowing, tortuous ride through Moscow with a hand-held camera tracking a Kyrgyz woman in search of work, heavily in debt, abandoning her newborn, and living underground in a grubby bunk. All she has is an expired work permit, all she wants is papers to get a legitimate identity in Russia.
Zain, the 12-year-old juvenile delinquent born to impoverished parents in Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm , is also seeking an ID. He questions the right of individuals to build families when they have neither the means nor the resources to bring up children. And so he sues his parents.
Checkboxes
As he fights his biological family, a family of illegal immigrants from Ethiopia, who are living in Lebanon on fake IDs, takes him in. Zain now dreams of migrating to Turkey. Ironically, the same festival showed Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, which hints at how the unrest in Turkey is reflected in the lack of direction the country’s youngsters exhibit.
Illegal immigration and moving workforces are only one of the many social issues that Labaki ticks in her film, along with crime, child labour, poverty and child marriage. Ironically, Labaki has cast a Syrian refugee girl in one of the main roles and reportedly, the real-life parents of the film’s one-year-old star, Treasure Bankole, were temporarily deported during filming. Talk of real approximating reel.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
