In
This World appears to be a documentary
of a true story, but in the style of the Blair
Witch Project (1999). The plot is
about sixteen-year-old orphan Jamal Udin Torabi and
his cousin, twentysomething Enayatullah, two Afghan
refugees in the Shamshatoo refugee camp of one million
Afghan refugees outside Peshawar, Pakistan, who start
out in February 2002 to go to London. They are two
of some one million refugees around the world each
year who pay a sum of money to organizers of a people
smuggling operation, that is, an underground railroad
for undocumented illegals to go from a very poor country
to a First World country. The filming starts with a
bus and truck trip from Peshawar to Quetta and on to
Iran, though they are sent back by police to Pakistan
and then return. Going through Kurdish Iran, they trek
on foot through the snow undetected past Iraq to Turkey,
and then fit into a container on board a cargo ship
from Istanbul to Trieste. Enayatullah and a few others
do not survive the container trip for lack of fresh
air; they are no longer "in this world." After
arriving in Trieste, Jamal pays for a train ticket
to France after stealing from a woman's purse. Then
he lies on a wood plank on the bottom of truck that
crosses the chunnel into England and on to London,
a trip six months in all. Titles at the end say that
Jamal's application for refugee status is denied, but
he is given extraordinary permission to remain temporarily;
he must leave England on the day before his eighteenth
birthday. Director Michael Winterbottom makes a quiet
plea for more acceptance of refugees who flee from
hopeless conditions, but his more explicit prayer is
that more money should be spent to help the refugees
that Jamal left behind, given the $7.9 billion cost
of the bombing in the Afghan War that created so many
of the Peshawar refugees. MH
I
want to comment on this film
