КАТАЛОГ СATALOG

ПОДОРОЖНІ WAYFARERS
Maksym Butkevych,
human rights activist, moderator of the program
A year and a half ago some Ukrainian media
started to report about ‘our own people,’
that is, about the forced migrants (a.k.a.
‘internally displaced persons,’ in the official
parlance) from the occupied territories and
the warzone. Ukraine was just starting to
get used to the new phenomenon of forced
internal migration. Waves of negativity
towards the migrants from the Donbas
began to recede as soon as the forced
migration took on concrete faces and
names: the ‘Donbasians,’ unidentifiable
at first, started to acquire the features of
specific living human beings with individual
destinies, joined by the tragedy of war and
occupation.
In the case of international forced migrants,
this has not happened. Even many of those
who would like to do it lack the appropriate
optics, calibrated to distinguish individual
features and destinies in the masses of
‘those refugees’ who are flooding the
territory of Europe. It is this optics that is
provided by documentary makers from
various countries. And then, the picture
changes.
In the special program of Docudays UA
dedicated to migration, you will not see
any ‘hordes of dangerous outlanders.’ We
see faces and hear voices that tell us about
the intimate matters, about how personal
worlds get ruined in the cruelty of war,
and how in their place, new ones emerge –
wherever that is possible. The small world
of refugees from Bosnia, from the times of
the previous large-scale refugee crisis in
Europe, can be seen through the eyes of the
teenage refugee which the director of Flotel
Europa was back then. The complex and
tragic story of one Syrian family, their love,
freedom and prisons, was recorded for years
by the director of A Syrian Love Story – who
in turn became part of the story itself. In
Road of a Migrant, Ukrainian labor migrants
pray for family reunions and their loved
ones in foreign lands, retelling the story of
how it is to be second-class citizens. And
the inhabitants of the tiny Italian island of
Lampedusa try, as a community, to deal with
local problems without abandoning the
migrants who are rescued in the sea by the
coastguards, and resenting those who use
their community to inflate fears of migrants
all over Europe.
During the special program on migration at
Docudays UA, you can see, hear and discuss
all this, thoughtfully and carefully. We will
do it without phobias and clichés – they are
inappropriate here.
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