Crossing Borders

Un Si Beau Voyage by French/Tunisian director Khaled Ghorbal tells the story of Mohammed, a Tunisian immigrant in Paris. Retired from his work due to a deadly illness, Mohammed is forced to leave the residence he has been staying at for many years. Having nowhere else to go, he decides to return to Tunisia, only to find out that his own country has also changed over all those years. In this sense life can be harsh for an immigrant. The constant feeling of being an outsider in a foreign country proves all the more bitter when the time comes to go back to your native country. Already experiencing “otherness” for many years, the person may feel alienated in his own homeland. The culture and traditions of one’s own country, which you have desperately tried to conserve all those years, now start to feel not so familiar, sometimes even “foreign”. If you are an immigrant, you are forever destined for loneliness. This hard aspect of immigration is successfully emphasised in Un Si Beau Voyage.

So why do people immigrate to other countries then? What is the main motive behind leaving your own country and going far away into unknown lands? Is it the hope of a better future? Is it the hope of finding heaven - a “promised land” - at the end of journey? These are the questions asked by Nulle Part Terre Promise, from French director Emmanuel Finkiel. The movie tells us about three (almost) intersecting stories: a group of Kurds trying to illegally cross borders in order to reach the United Kingdom; a young manager supervising the relocation of a factory from France to Hungary, despite protests from the workers; a female student travelling across Europe, filming people beaten down by life. Seeming very different at first glance, the stories are related to each other in that they deal with border-crossing and the different motives behind it.

The movie fills the mind with questions, making the viewer wonder how the lives of all these people will turn out. Will the Kurdish immigrants ever be able to feel themselves secure and happy in the country they are migrating to? Will the locals perceive them as unwanted guests, visiting for a short stay, or will they eventually be accepted by society? Will the young manager overcome his guilty conscience? And will the student ever be able to reach the person she is trying to call so desperately throughout the movie? Will she eventually overcome the boredom she seems to be floating in?

Immigrants have always been an important factor throughout the history of humanity. But still they have been seen as - at best - uninvited guests. Even if there existed a minority of locals who saw them as human beings with equal rights, for the majority they always have been and still are the source of all kinds of troubles in society. The “promised land” is not easy to find, and the life of an immigrant is not without trouble.

As Ingeborg Bachmann beautifully said in her poem Exile:

I am the overflow in cities paved with gold/ And countryside growing green/ Discarded long time ago/ And remembered for nothing.

Ilkin Mehrabov