Acclaimed in 2018 for Bitter Flowers [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Olivier Meys
ficha de la película], which won the Magritte for Best First Film, Olivier Meys is returning to cinemas with Jahia’s Summer [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Olivier Meys
ficha de la película], which was screened in the National Competition of Brussels International Film Festival (BRIFF) after world premiering in the Gothenburg Festival. Jahia’s story has an intimate coming-of-age feel, revolving around a young asylum seeker who’s waiting for a response to her application from the authorities, and her encounter with Mila, a young Belarussian who’s as optimistic as she is cheerful and who changes Jahia’s view of the world. Olivier Meys casts an incredibly gentle look over this intense time in their lives without concealing its harsher side.

Cineuropa: What made you want to set your film in a centre for asylum seekers?
Olivier Meys: I lived in China for a long time, quite far removed from the issues we’re familiar with in Belgium, and especially from the migrant crisis which has exploded since the war in Syria. When I came back to Europe, this subject crept up on me, and I was particularly interested in how teens might experience that time spent waiting, that uncertainty around their future. I come from the documentary world, so visiting asylum seeker centres felt like the obvious thing to do in order to try to understand. I met young people there, but working people too, and when I learned about what’s known as Resignation Syndrome, meaning children or teens who slip into a coma-like sleep state which they can’t wake up from, it reinforced my conviction to tell these stories, one way or another.

Who are your two heroines, Jahia and Mila?
At the beginning of the film, Jahia is quite withdrawn, she has to care for her mother whose mental health fluctuates, and she’s really stressed from waiting for the authorities’ response to her asylum request. She seems to have abandoned school and her future, in some sense, and she can’t seem to get off the ground. Mila, by contrast, seems to have broken free from that anxiety; she’s full of energy and she wants to be able to dream. She doesn’t want to envisage failure. As often happens, there’s a real force of attraction between these two opposing characters, and their friendship is the kind that shifts the lines, that changes people.

And we do get to see Jahia’s gradual metamorphosis.
Yes, before she meets Mila and both in how she survives and in her self-sacrifice. She doesn’t dare to dream. It’s from her friendship with Mila that she draws the strength to push forwards, while thinking about herself too.

It’s as if both of them are prevented from making plans or moving forwards.
What’s striking in asylum seeker centres is that everyone is waiting. In adults, it translates into a tendency to live in the past, to cling onto memories. Whereas in young people, there’s a desire to learn the host country’s language, to integrate, but their fate is still up in the air. They’re drifting, while waiting. That’s also why I wanted to set the story in an asylum centre in the middle of the woods, which is actually a former holiday centre, far away from the town and all the hubbub. They live in a really pastoral little bubble, a kind of Tower of Babel which leaves them even more isolated.

And how did you envisage the mise en scène for this really difficult time in their lives?
I wanted the film to be very gentle. The violence she experiences is both inside of her and off camera. It’s systemic, we don’t necessarily see it. I also wanted this gentleness to be an entry point to exploring their journeys, to draw us into their stories in a very simple way.

Is it also a way of re-humanising the migration issues which we see but no longer pay attention to on the news?
Yes, the idea wasn’t to make a propaganda film, or a work which tackles these themes head-on, but to lend them real human form through these two teens, to create a bond of humanity with viewers.