More often than not, immigration into Europe is framed in the most sensationalist of terms. Reactionaries frame it as a “crisis,” with people being described as animals, or “hordes” that need to be “controlled.” So, too, is diaspora depicted as merely the coming-on of crime. “What’s happening today is the crime wave of tomorrow,” barks a French nationalist off-screen, on the television. In the next scene of Europe’s New Faces, director, editor and producer Sam Abbas shows us a woman carefully nursing a newborn. Perhaps these are just people looking to survive.
Abbas’s mission is de-glorification. If migrants are either seen as terrorists threatening Europe’s old ways or else idolized for their ability to survive without further consideration of their personhood, then Abbas aims to strike a careful balance. Yes, migrants of the global south are facing extraordinary hardship just to establish a life, but they are also just people like anyone else. They cook meals together, get bored, live and die. Like fellow documentarian Frederick Wiseman, Abbas mostly sits back and lets his camera observe, allowing his subjects to speak for themselves, both literally and figuratively — the bulk of Europe’s New Faces comprises people waiting in cruel purgatory, where most of the tension lives in the context off-screen, like a viper waiting for its moment to strike.
In Europe’s New Faces, Observation Is An Act of Solidarity
Europe’s New Faces is split into two sections. In the first, “Land & Integration,” Abbas observes African migrants who have crossed through Libya and the Mediterranean Sea to settle in Paris squats. These cramped quarters, essentially international dorms with poorly kept shared kitchens and baths, become the site of makeshift mini-communities as the people inside them await the next stage of their fate.
Abbas creates a series of striking compositions and still-lifes in this first section, giving us, as close as he can, the textured experience of being trapped within dilapidated walls. Other than the occasional musical sting by fellow director Bertrand Bonello, whose score is defined by machinic discordance, these are extremely unromantic frames of uncommon intimacy. Despite the heaviness of the film’s subject matter, most scenes are actually innocuous: a woman washing dishes as she listens to the music of her home country, frying chicken, kids making a makeshift pool and splashing water, a man explaining the rules of checkers on a DIY board.
The intimate approach ingratiates us into their lives while punctuating the moments that are tinged with the weight of the world. In one of those moments, a young man calls home in a phone call that clues us into how hard it is to get medical care. Later, a group forms to talk about how they might battle an oncoming eviction notice. And, in the film’s most viscerally powerful scene, a woman’s life — and that of her baby’s — is saved through an emergency cesarean. Perhaps the most cogent self-defense comes from one migrant who simply says, “I can’t pursue my dreams until I get my papers.” Are these really future criminals, or are they just hoping for a life of dignity? Abbas’s film plays as a soft-spoken counter-narrative, an inherently humanistic portrayal of a diaspora in waiting.
Through form and function, Abbas demonstrates the ironic and contradictory nature of his very enterprise, as the temporal fixity of the photograph clashes with the persistent movement of a migrant constantly pulled in multiple directions.
In part two, “Sea & Passage,” Abbas captures an armed migrant attack in between scenes of volunteers with Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) on a boat, waiting in their doldrums. The crew discusses plans and prepares, but they also sit around and look at the vast empty sea, or else play foosball in a rare moment of genuine relaxation. At some point, Abbas switches from the moving image to an image that moves, still photographs that have been taken with noticeable camera shake. Through form and function, Abbas demonstrates the ironic and contradictory nature of his very enterprise, as the temporal fixity of the photograph clashes with the persistent movement of a migrant constantly pulled in multiple directions.
Abbas’ approach to the material sometimes risks being indulgent; this is a long film with a slower pace, which wouldn’t matter so much if there was a bit more diversity of images. More frustrating is the self-sabotaging choice to keep most of these subjects nameless, and, sometimes, faceless. In the few scenes of extensive dialogue, the camera is fixed on the person hearing the story. But, then again, the choice creates a powerful POV whereby we are both teller and receptor of these people’s lives.
It seems Abbas is arguing for a simple kind of dignity. Migrants deserve it, not because they face outsized hardship but because they would still be humans even if they didn’t. Palestinian activist and author Mohammed El-Kurd calls this phenomenon, this urge to place the displaced on a pedestal as the “perfect victim.” People of the Global South are often tasked with being flawless before they can be given the lives they deserve.
But, maybe the first step to seeing migrants as equals is to understand just how normal life looks between moments of life and death. In Abbas’s hands, the act of observation is a form of altruism. Hear them speak, watch them dance. Feel what it means to be a human in movement, even while you wait.