The #refugee crisis that peaked in 2016 as hundreds of thousands of #migrants tried to reach safer and more liveable conditions in #Europe through perilous journeys across the #Mediterranean, has been one of the key global news stories shaping the decade and ideological shifts in global politics — so it’s no surprise that countless documentaries have been made about it. Amid this deluge of films, Slovakian filmmaker and visual artist Tomáš Rafa’s Refugees Are Welcome Here, screening at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, stands out as among the most immersively raw and hard-hitting. With a broad, multi-country scope, it manages, without presumptive narrativising or commentary, and without manipulative sentimentality, to capture how extreme tensions around the issue have been leveraged by a #far-right resurgence in Europe, entrenching ever-deeper societal divisions. Rafa has assembled segments of footage documenting exchanges and clashes between different groups moving through or blockading Europe’s travel routes, whose identities and interests exert pressure upon one another and test basic, shared humanity.
Inside the pressure cooker
Rafa has been documenting growing #nationalism and #neo-fascism in the former Visegrad region (Central European nations the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) since 2009. Refugees Are Welcome Here witnesses and catalogues these tendencies, but first Rafa provides a window onto a German protest in which «No one is illegal» signs are held — the slogan of anti-statist activists who wish to bring wider attention to the plight of non-resident refugees and support their rights. Tensions are high and anger flares as they clash with police, a flashpoint indicative of wider societal tensions that have grown in a nation that under Chancellor Merkel allowed in an unprecedented number of refugees in the summer of 2015, and of a police force that has come under heavy scrutiny of late for harbouring officers with far-right tendencies.
From here, Rafa takes us into pressure-cooker situations of intense emotion and stress in refugee camps and along the migrant routes into the #European Union#, as desperate families traveling on foot face abruptly closing borders. Crushed together in large numbers, they struggle to have their most fundamental needs of survival recognised. Volunteers who have traveled from within the EU to help do their best to ease the way, and implement a more peaceful approach than unpredictable security forces. «Nobody tells anybody what to do, yet everybody does what is necessary. Despite this punk approach, it runs like clockwork,» says a volunteer in a Greek camp, in a film that doesn’t spell out any prescription for action, but shows the essential work done through alternative modes of organisation by self-directed citizens that provides a buffer beyond the limits of state aid. It is the kind of footage that becomes especially significant for hope as, later in the film, we see the hatred that can erupt when such vacuums of control are taken advantage of by self-organised far-right elements. Volunteers also register shock at the sheer masses and suffering they witness. One Czech volunteer at the Slovenia-Croatia border describes a situation «like from some post-apocalyptic movie.» The footage is heartrending in the sheer discomfort and panic of a crowd pushed to the psychological edge, pressed against a fence with no way through. Women scream, and babies are passed overhead, assisted by guards endeavouring to calm the masses and avert a crush. Many of the security along the #Balkan borders have empathy etched on their faces, no doubt with the brutal displacements of their own nations’ histories a fresh memory. This is less the case at the border between #Serbia and #Hungary on the day that it closes in 2015, as confused and panicked arrivals are met with the implacable expressions of a security force in line with the nationalist, anti-refugee sentiments of Viktor Orbán’s regime.
Displays of hate
Far-right demonstrations and marches across various locations in Central Europe confront us with visceral displays of hatred that bear the signs of ancient prejudices simply revived in a new form. Anti-semitic rhetoric at a rally in #Slovakia, and calls for a «white Poland» based on bloodlines in #Warsaw, show that the xenophobic poison that ripped Europe apart during World War Two has merely been sleeping under the guise of a unified bloc, with #Islamophobia just the latest incarnation of ethnic othering. At Budapest’s Keleti railway station in 2015, migrants are warned by police to make themselves scarce as a trainload of «Nazi» football hooligans is about to pull in. In #Vienna, police struggle to keep Antifa and far-right demonstrators, with their opposing chants of «Nazis Get Out» and «Refugees Go Home,» apart. In #Bratislava, the rhetoric of neo-Nazi politician Marian Kotleba stirs up a viciously misogynistic crowd against leftist «traitors» and «whores» of the European Parliament, who they call to be hung, and abuse is hurled openly at women wearing hijabs in the street.
It’s a tone of such virulent hatred that confirms the deepest unease over what such forces would be capable of repeating on European soil; a hatred that brings to mind the crowds in Jean-Gabriel Periot’s famed, devastating found-footage film Even If She Had Been A Criminal… (2006) in which we see the public humiliation by jeering, violent crowds of French women accused of having slept with their Nazi occupiers. Refugees Are Welcome Here leaves us, ultimately, with the sense that shared humanity that sees every person as our moral responsibility, and reconciliation and acceptance of difference as the way out of historical #trauma and polarisation, is Europe’s only hope.
