In thiiiss world?

IN THIS WORLD
Country: England (BBC Films)
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Award: Winner, Berlin International Film Festival, Golden Bear – Best Film.
Ecumenical Jury Prize – Peace Film Prize.
Language: Pashtu (with English Subtitles).

Some Facts from the movie:
14.5 million refugees in the world – more than 5 million refugees in Asia – 1 million refugees in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier Peshawar, mostly Afghani who fled the Russian invasion of 1979 and US led bombing campaign of Afghanistan.
7.9 billion dollars – US spent on the bombing campaign in Afghanistan.
Daily ration for an Afghani refugee – 480 grams of wheat flour and 25 grams of vegetable oil.
Each family is provided a tent, a plastic sheet, a blanket and a stove.
Annually 1 million people give their lives at the hand of people smugglers – most of them die on the way, some get caught by authorities and some survives.

It is a horrific and dramatic story of two Afghan refugees’ journey to freedom from the northwestern frontiers of Pakistan to London, England through the countries: Iran, Turkey, Italy and France. The movie depicts the desperation these people will take to escape persecution and the life threatening conditions they face along the way. The main character of the movie is a young Afghan boy called Jamal, a refugee orphan who worked in a brick factory and got paid less than $1 a day.

I have never seen such vivid emotions revealed in a piece of art with such grace. Especially you get entangled with the characters as if you have embarked on a journey with them. And imagine traveling from Pakistan to England by land and particularly avoiding getting caught – spending an evening surrounded by vegetable crates in a truck, crossing an entire mountain by foot on a chilly night, surviving in a 10 ft by 10 ft closed box with 6 other people for 40 hours without food and water, using wooden planks to lie under the belly of a truck for an entire day. And all this for what? Freedom…
More about People Smuggling

Somehow the movie reminded me of David Carter’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph – a starving Sudanese girl dragging herself towards the United Nations Camp and a vulture in the background waiting for her to die. The civil war at Sudan in the 1990s cutoff a majority of the Sudanese population from the UN relief supplies leading to millions of people dying out of starvation.
More about Carter and his photograph

Civil war still goes on in Africa; Middle East is in a cyclical turmoil of violence for decades; Violence is still the most potent form of negotiation for many countries – and all this for what? - A piece of land, or oil, or a political agenda.
Statistics of War Casualties of the 20th Century

A must-see movie; 4 and a half stars, and not for the weaker hearts.