28/02/2025 - In his observational documentary, Sam Abbas follows the day-to-day lives of migrants in a Parisian squat and the sea rescue operations of an NGO to show how they’re living in limbo

Talking about migration has become exhausting. The debate has now reached the point where migrants are being singled out as devils in our midst. Anti-migration rhetoric dominates electoral campaigns. Driven by the rise of the populist alt-right, the demand for drastic measures, such as border controls, has become the norm for European centrist parties. But recent research shows that closing the borders does very little to halt immigration. In fact, it can actually increase it. The film world is continuing to tackle this gargantuan theme, with new voices continually joining the debate. Another new perspective has now been offered up by the Egyptian-born American filmmaker Sam Abbas in his observational documentary Europe’s New Faces. 

Abbas first made his name in 2018 with his LGBT-themed film The Wedding, for which he organised secret screenings in different countries where homosexuality is outlawed. Europe’s New Faces is based on the recent seven-minute short film Obstaculum, which sees Abbas filming people hailing from the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Senegal, Sudan, Tchad, Eritrea and Ethiopia as they attempt to occupy a disused Parisian art school.

Unlike many documentaries exploring this subject, which mostly revolve around interviews, Europe’s New Faces isn’t a film of many words. Images reign supreme in its 159-minute runtime. Even the testimonies given by the migrants only consist of a few, incisive phrases, and this is one of the movie’s strongpoints: it’s not didactic. “I can’t realise my dreams until I’ve got my ‘papers’. Lots of people born in France who are even older than me still don’t have their documents”, a young African man explains. Divided into two distinct halves, the doc’s first part (Land & Integration) focuses on an abandoned building in Paris which was once a retirement home and which is now home to roughly 400 African immigrants who have travelled here from Libya. Abbas’ ever-static camera (the film took four years to make) leisurely follows small, everyday activities: women cooking, children bathing in a mini-inflatable pool or having lessons with a teacher, people playing chess or learning to use a camera, religious rites, meetings about the most recent threats from the mayor made against illegal immigrants… We also see signs warning of imminent evictions, empty stairways and rooms in semi-darkness, rubbish in corners. And we hear snippets of tales about violence suffered in Libyan detention camps, women forming the focus of the guards’ sexual amusement, torture, and the cruel tricks used by human traffickers.

The second half (Sea & Passage) is shot on board an NGO migrant rescue ship (Médecins Sans Frontieres’ Geo Barents). Here, too, we see static shots of anchors and life preservers, navigational tools, operational meetings, sightings and radio communications, and then the tragic footage of a group of Bangladeshis being rescued, their boat now in flames. Once on board, they wash, tend to the wounded, eat, sleep, pray, play chess. In both chapters, waiting seems to be the major component of these migrants’ experience.

Abbas’ particular style, which emerged in his previous works, is reaffirmed here through compositions made charming by the use of natural light, while the film’s meditative, irregular jump-cut editing - accompanied by music courtesy of the director and composer Bertrand Bonello – lends even greater intimacy to these personal stories of resilience and desperation, and distances the movie from frantic, journalistic reportage. Having been an immigrant from Egypt to the USA himself when he was three, the director looks to convey without filter or mediation what it really means to straddle two worlds, in a no-man’s land.

Europe’s New Faces was produced by Abbas with Maxxie, Suzzee & Cinema, with support from United Migrants, Utopia 56, Médecins Sans Frontières, Médecins du Monde and the Italian Red Cross, among other backers.

(Translated from Italian)