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MovieMail's Review
There aren't many films which can claim to take you around the world in eighty-nine minutes. Michael Winterbottom here confirms his standing among the most interesting directors in Britain today by telling the story of two Afghan refugees - one in his early teens, the other in his twenties - who set off from a holding camp in Pakistan for the UK, via Iran, Turkey, the Mediterranean, Italy, and the now infamous Sangatte refugee site in France.
Shot on digital video, this has the same documentary aesthetic as an Iranian film, but is, more significantly, cut like an action movie. It's an adventure in the truest sense of the word: despite a credit for writer Tony Grisoni, In This World plays like the work of a filmmaker going out with a camera and finding a story for himself, rather than having one land on his desk in the form of somebody else's script. Individual scenes paint a palpable sense of the heat, dust, dampness and chill of the areas the characters pass through; the most disturbing sequence has the refugees locked in the back of a lorry in the hold of a cargo ship for forty-eight hours.
In the face of such suffering, it's a good job the leads are such an endearing, well-matched pair: young Jamal's ebullience seems even brighter when set next to the understandably tired, slightly dopey Enayat. It's a long journey, and a rough ride in places, but what sticks in the mind is the goodness and generosity of the people we encounter, an enormous rebuke to anyone making sweeping generalisations about the character and intentions of those seeking asylum. It may be a small world, but there are clearly some big hearts within it.
A compelling drama-documentary that looks at the extent refugees will go to to fiind a safe haven from their own country's regimes. Afghan orphan Jamal and his older cousin Enayat embark on a hazardous journey to London from their refugee camp at Peshawar in north-west Pakistan. Having travelled overland to Turkey, they then have join other refugees in a shipping container along to cross the sea to Italy and then continue overland to London. Winterbottom used digital video, untrained actors and improvised dialogue to give the film a true feeling of how dangerous and how desperate the journey to safety is, and involves us by focussing on the practicalities of the immense journey, rather than on political point-scoring. A story of human endurance and courage in the face of immense isolation and disorientation.
In this World uses hand-held cameras, an improvised script and non-professional actors to depict the tortuous journey of two Afghan refugees from a camp in Pakistan to... more >
In this World uses hand-held cameras, an improvised script and non-professional actors to depict the tortuous journey of two Afghan refugees from a camp in Pakistan to London. In retrospect it looks this was the film in which style and subject were perfectly matched for Winterbottom. Though the story is fictitious, it carries an enormous weight of truth - it is moving and enlightening in a way that a documentary couldn't match. It is impossible to watch and not have one's horizons broadened. Nothing has changed since this film was made to make this any less than essential viewing. < less
