‘I wanted to humanise those lost in the statistics’: four directors on their new movies depicting refugee journeys

How does it feel to risk trafficking and torture to seek a better life in a strange land? Ahead of four films telling migrant stories, we hear from directors including Matteo Garrone and Milad Alami about tackling one of the most pressing issues of our time

The telling of stories is an act of profound hospitality. Story is an ancient form of generosity, one that will always tell us everything we need to know about the contemporary world. It is fundamental to the communicative survival of the human species and has always been a welcoming-in; always, one way or another, a gracious meeting of the needs of self and other. The narratives we exchange don’t just validate all of us, they represent us much more truly than data or statistics or a passport ever will. Our individual selves transform in the telling into something shared and communal. This is because story is the opposite of an exclusion zone; by its nature, it’s always an inclusion zone, because a story that sets out to exclude won’t work as a story at all, its agenda being something else altogether.

A glance at recent UK news is as telling about the inhumanity of our country’s treatment of refugees as ever. If I’m an asylum seeker here living in the care of the Home Office, and I die, then no one in the Home Office will care to notify my family. If I’m a rough sleeper on the streets of England, then the chances are more likely than not I’m a refugee who’s been evicted from Home Office temporary accommodation. (That’s just last week’s news.)