Afew years ago, 29-year-old Alex Farrell was another struggling young actor in Hollywood who had drifted to Los Angeles from London. “I realised it wasn’t what I wanted and LA didn’t afford me the opportunity,” he says. “It’s easy to get lost in the Hollywood bubble. I decided I was more interested in being behind the camera.”
On a cold, rainy morning, sitting in his two-room cabin behind his mother’s house in Kent, he is drinking pear juice and smoking roll-ups, telling me that, “after seeing the horror and despair refugees face as they seek safety and shelter”, he felt driven to tell their stories.
The result is Refugee, a film shot over an eight-month journey showing the impact of war through the eyes of the people who live through it. “It was awful, heartbreaking, terrifying, and I was naive to think I was ready for it,” he says. “It was bitterly cold. The rain was torrential. People were suffering from hypothermia. Children were frozen, screaming and crying.”
Yet Farrell was struck by their resilience and optimism. “Many had been on the road for months, yet they still smiled, shared what little food and water they had, which was inspiring given the losses and atrocities they endured. Amid the chaos, I was also amazed by the unconditional kindnesses of volunteers and soldiers working around the clock to help them.”
All this is reflected powerfully in the film; poignant shots of pelicans flying over midnight-blue seas contrast with wave after wave of displaced people suffering from hunger, exposure and sickness. After losing everything, forced to leave their homes and country, with nowhere to go and surviving perilous sea crossings, they are subjected to beatings and tear-gassed by police at gridlocked borders. In the midst of it all, Farrell keeps filming and often at great personal risk. As he walks with them through 10 countries, he is incarcerated by the Macedonian military and beaten by the Croatian riot police.
The idea for Farrell’s film came to him several years before when he returned from LA to London, feeling lost but determined to do something meaningful with his life. “I went to Kenya and spent three months working in a wildlife reserve documenting poaching, and to Peru to shoot a children’s charity working up in the Andes; and from there to Norway, where I lived on a boat in the north Atlantic ocean, photographing onboard a sustainable fishing boat. That’s when I saw the newspaper about the Syrian migration. I was excited, sad, intrigued.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
