We've watched two movies in recent weeks that deal, very differently but equally poignantly, with the plight of the asylum-seeker.

The first, A Season in France (Une saison en France), by Chadian film-maker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, came out in 2018.

We meet two brothers who have fled the Central African Republic. One, Abbas, has two children, but lost his wife en route to France. The other, Etienne, is single. 

Abbas and his children are constantly on the move. The owner of the flat where we first meet them is returning, so they have to leave. They can't afford for very long the rent on the next place, which in any case bears the hallmark of the "sleep merchant" (a "marchand de sommeil" is the French label for someone who rents out inferior dwellings at exploitative rates). Abbas's girlfriend, a colleague from the market where he works, takes them in, but by this time Abbas is an overstayer, and he fears getting her into trouble. 

Etienne, meanwhile, has found or built himself a shack. He relies on the local baths for a shower and a place to change into the suit he wears as a security guard. One day he returns to find his shack burnt to the ground.


The photos were taken in Irun, Spain, in early 2020. In the previous two years, there had been an upswing in the number of displaced persons entering Spain, with the result that the Spanish border towns of Irun and La Jonquera became known as the Iberian equivalent of the Italian border town of Ventimiglia in Italy (though with a much less dire humanitarian situation)

As Le Monde's review points out, the movie works hard to avoid what the French call "miserabilisme" (a morbid and somewhat exploitative fascination with the sordid).

We see that both men are intelligent and cultivated; they love books; they speak impeccable French. The children are well turned out, and go to school. Despite the constant aura of impermanence that surrounds these people, there are many beautiful little scenes of domesticity and quasi-normality: lullabies, family meals, birthday parties...

So, although Haroun allows us to see very clearly the brothers' loss of autonomy (the asylum process is a profoundly infantilizing one, it seems), we also see that they have maintained an awe-inspiring dignity . 

Without papers, though, your range of choices is minuscule. You have to accept a job that is way beneath your capabilities. You're constantly depending on favours. You're living out of a rucksack, from hand to mouth. You're forced to queue up to read a printed list that will tell you whether your request for asylum has been granted (seriously, is this how it's done, and if so, is there really not a better way??) Both men have found girlfriends, who are kind and helpful, but it's difficult to sustain a relationship with this feeling of transience hanging over your head. And you can't marry without papers either...

Yes, we can find fault with Abbas for taking out his anger on his market-stall vegetables, and thereby losing his job, or for not following up on the next (no doubt infinitely tedious and frustrating) court procedure. But I'd be raging by now, I think, and equally unwilling to court renewed disappointment by heading off on what I too would suspect to be another fool's errand. 

By the end of the movie, Etienne has committed suicide, and Abbas and the children are on the run.

We know that few good options await them. 



The Other Side of Hope (by Finnish director Ari Kaurismaki, 2017), which also features the story of an asylum-seeker, is billed as a bitter-sweet comedy. How can that be, I wondered. "Asylum-seeker" and "comedy" are not words that hang together that easily.

And yet it in the midst of its tragedy, it is funny. Bleak but wry. A good symbol of these strange bedfellows is the music. We get subtitles for the lyrics, and they're so lugubrious, so egregiously dark, that they're funny. And Kaurismaki is brilliant at tableaux. He seems able to mine a vein of silent-movie humour, in which little is said, but lots is "looked".

This time our refugee, Khaled, is from Syria. There he lost everything except his sister, and somewhere along the escape route, she went missing. The TV news shows horrible things happening to Aleppo, his home city. Yet for the Finnish authorities, Aleppo just isn't violent enough to give the green light for asylum.

So he too goes illegal.

It's at this point that he meets a different kind of escapee. Wikstrom is native Finnish, but he too is making a new start. He has left his chain-smoking, bottle-hitting, nail-polishing wife, and his shirt business, and gambled his way to owning a downmarket restaurant, which comes complete with a few uninspiring employees.

Wikstrom takes Khaled in, gives him a job, and provides him with a cubby-hole to live in and some cash in hand. He also introduces him to someone who can solve his papers problem. 

The restaurant setting provides plenty of moments of humour (the team cheerfully embark on a Japanese theme, for example, and the amount of research that has gone into this venture is indicated by the vast portions of wasabi with which they anoint the food).

Peter Bradshaw describes the deadpan approach like this: "Kaurismaki’s kind of mannered, controlled comedy might just induce alienation in the hands of another film-maker, but here it is quite the opposite. However ridiculous the story is, and its intensely managed ridiculousness is part of the attraction, there is always sympathy, a lightness of touch. We have sympathy for Khaled, and for Wikstrom, and we believe in their sympathy with each other."

Nor does the comedy mean that the difficulties of Khaled's life are glossed over. He remains easy prey for the kind of right-wing thugs you really just itch to introduce to the bottom of the ocean. And he has to adjust to the subtle distinctions of Finland's social mores (always look cheerful, a fellow asylum-seeker advises him at the reception centre, but don't smile on the street or people will think you're crazy...).

Khaled's sister turns up, just as he has been viciously attacked. He makes sure she is shepherded to the police station to register her asylum application. You wonder how this is all going to pan out, and what their prospects are. But at the end, there is just a glimmer of optimism. His sister is safe. He is still alive. Where there's life there's hope.

I hope.