Refugees and #migrants have long been a common part of our daily news diet, thrust at us on television bulletins or through aggressive tabloid headlines.
The anonymous men and women who trudged across Europe three or four years ago; the capsized boats and drowned bodies in the Aegean, refugees are a faceless mass, a political headache, a tool for bigots, and a source of guilt for liberals.
But who are these people who flee war and terror, repression and intolerance? What motives them? How do they live once they have sought asylum in a largely uncaring world?
Raw & revealing
Eva Mulvad’s film seeks answers to these questions in an intimate film that allows a couple and their child to speak for the millions of others who are in movement today, fleeing literally for their lives.
Leila and Sahand, the heroes of Love Child are an Iranian couple who fled #Tehran with their little boy Mani in 2012. Filmed from the very first day they get on a plane to neighbouring #Turkey – unsure whether dawn will offer life or death – this is the beginning of a raw and revealing journey in which the young couple opens up their lives and hearts to the filmmakers.
Conceived by a Danish artist who had been approached after meeting Sahand (at the time an English teacher who had been coerced into working as a low-level informant for the Iranian secret police), the film seamlessly weaves together mobile phone footage with more cinematic scenes to tell the story of forbidden love and the desperate straits that seeking asylum brings to the family.
Like Sahand, Leila is a teacher. Both had been married when they met and had an illicit affair in a country where adultery can bring, at best, a public whipping (for the man) and at worst a public stoning to death (for the woman).
Unhappy in their marriages – in Leila’s case one that had not even been consummated (and told by a judge when she sought a divorce to find solace in religion and television) – Mani, the love child of the title, is the result of their hidden affair.
When the tension of keeping this secret grew too large – and the secret police, suspecting what had happened, pressured Sahand to turn Leila into an informant too – they flee with Mani in the hope of beginning a new life in safety.
Mirages
Intelligent, sensitive, hard-working and engaging, the couple soon find that though #Turkey accepts them as asylum seekers, securing a safe third country, a new passport, and a new life are mirages that disappear no sooner than they are first sighted on the horizon.
Although they are, in some ways, more privileged than many #asylum seekers# – they secure a pleasant little rented apartment on the outskirts of #Istanbul and both eventually win the right to work and are hired by a local school – the constant insecurity and snail’s pace of their two cases with the #UNHCR (United Nations High Commission on Refugees) takes its toll though.
Leila and Mani’s case is considered separately from Sahand’s because they are not married; even a DNA test proving Mani is their son makes no difference. When Leila and Mani are granted refugee status and a chance to leave for America, they are jubilant, but Sahand still has no word on his case.
There is a dreadful inevitability about Sahand’s eventual refusal – the UNHCR don’t buy his story that he was forced to spy for #Iran’s fundamentalist regime – and the news is enough to crush most people.
Fighting on
But like the deep love and touching faith the couple has in each other – despite at times explosive rows – they fight on. The one chance they have, their lawyer explains, is to get the divorce certificates from the Iranian embassy to allow them to marry in Turkish law. Both have, by now, divorced in Iran, but their papers are not in order.
like the deep love and touching faith the couple have in each other…they fight on
Cue a gut-wrenching scene where the couple must enter the Iranian embassy in Istanbul to request the documents. Shot a couple of years before Saudi journalist #Jamal Khashoggi# was murdered in the Saudi consulate in the same city, one feels the chill that is running through the couple as they kiss their son before disappearing behind a corner to get the papers.
Papers in hand, they marry, and in one of the many light-hearted scenes that give the film pace and texture, pose for a sweet family portrait with Mani between them. The marriage, finally, is enough for the UNHCR, and Sahand is granted leave to remain.
Finding closure in a film that really has none was a difficult artistic decision, the director Eva Mulvad, told a Q&A at Helsinki’s #DocPoint#2020 where the film screened late January. Eventually, after six years of filming, Mani’s 11th birthday party serves as a punctuation point in a story that may never be resolved.
one feels the chill that is running through the couple as they kiss their son before disappearing behind a corner
Today the family remains in Turkey as stateless refugees; U.S. President #Donald Trump#’s decision early in his term to close America visitors (and refugees) from a raft of Muslim countries slammed the door on those hopes. Their relative security means they are no longer a high profile family for further resettlement, leaving them in a limbo where they never feel entirely safe living in a country with a common border with Iran. Love Child is very much a story of and for our times.
Love Child also screened at #IDFA and TIFF
