Amel Alzakout recorded her crossing from Istanbul, from which 15 hours of navigation is required to arrive by boat in Greece. She documents the trajectory with a small waterproof camera that she hides in her life vest ; as the boat capsizes, the camera continues filming of its own accord.
Alzakout wanted to document the journey first and foremost for herself. The idea of making a film with the material came later, raising various legal issues: how to use these images without adversely affecting the dignity of those featured in them? She was firm on one point: not one face would be revealed. The only scene in which, motivated by anger, she deliberately orients her camera towards a subject–certainly a non-human one–shows the arrival of a military helicopter that negotiates the shipwreck from the air above.
She accompanies these images with a poetic narration: a stream of consciousness of a kind, an oral history that counters the dominant external media discourse.

For her, it is essential to relate her experience in emotional terms, avoiding representing herself as victim. What sorts of thoughts occupy the minds of people awaiting such a rescue ? It’s the very question that motivates her narration, in which the “I” becomes generic, able to express the lived experience of other refugees who have undertaken this same crossing. Khaled Abdulwahed, her partner and co-director, served as a witness of a kind, who could do nothing but follow the GPS dot and wait, already in Europe, struggling as he was with a strong sense of guilt. The narration, written in dialogue, constructs an emotional mosaic of the feeling-scape each experiences during this journey.

Gabrielle Ouimet
Tënk's Artistic Director