“Sometimes I feel happy, and sometimes I feel really scared.”
Spoken in hushed tones by Aisha Osagie (Letitia Wright), this sentence encapsulates director Frank Berry’s emotional drama, Aisha. Aisha tells the story of a Nigerian woman fleeing violence in her homeland and attempting to seek asylum in Northern Ireland. Caught in limbo in Ireland’s immigration system, Aisha develops a friendship with Conor Healy (Josh O’Connor), a member of staff at the accommodation centre in which she is housed.
When watching a film about the plight of refugees and asylum seekers, the motivations behind making such a film must always be kept in mind. Usually, these films are made to expose the harsh reality of the asylum-seeking system and to share the terrifying experience of fleeing with those who may have very little understanding of their situations. For the most part, Aisha does just that. Wright’s character is shown butting heads with intolerant security guards at her accommodation centre and struggling to find a job that allows for the unexpected occurrences of her circumstances. When she isn’t being tormented by the asylum system, Aisha is shown making bonds with the other residents and building a community around herself wherever she goes. When Aisha says, “They just ask so many questions,” we can feel the exhaustion emanating from every aspect of Wright’s performance as she looks down in frustration at the cruelty of the asylum system. In this film, the balance between showcasing trauma and levity is largely handled with care, and while both Letitia Wright and Josh O’Connor give affecting performances, it is O’Connor’s inclusion in this story that muddies the motivations of this film.
O’Connor plays a security guard, Conor, at the facility where Aisha is being held. He himself has a history of incarceration and, to some extent, understands the brutality of the state. Crucially, though, Conor becomes a love interest for Aisha, and it is this inserted romance that complicates readings of this film. Aisha is not based on any one person’s specific story but is rather a fictional account of this journey as understood from an outsider’s perspective. As a result, the storyline of a white security guard falling in love with a Black asylum seeker feels contentious. It feels like an attempt to assuage guilt felt over the treatment of asylum seekers and non-white refugees in particular. When Conor declares, “I’ve never met anyone like you,” one can’t help but feel apprehensive about the complexity of such a statement. The thinly veiled implication that ‘not all members of the border force are bad’ feels dismissive of what is known to be an unforgiving system and complicates the messaging of what would otherwise be a pretty run-of-the-mill refugee film.
Perhaps this is to be expected from a director who doesn’t have a complete understanding of the intricate ways in which race intersects with state violence. When making note of recent films about refugees and asylum seekers, I was struck by the fact that these films often come from white directors. Aisha reminded me of 2020’s Limbo, a film directed by Ben Sharrock that also played during the London Film Festival. Like Aisha, Limbo follows a group of asylum seekers as they await the decision of the Home Office, though Sharrock’s film is set in Scotland. This could, of course, be a case of directors simply wanting to make films that comment on the current state of their immediate community; both Berry and Sharrock seem intent on highlighting the poor treatment of asylum seekers by their respective governments. However, when the most well-known films about refugees come from a white lens, one cannot help but question why that is.
There comes a point where we, as an audience, must ask ourselves how many times we need to see a fictionalized retelling of the trauma of being a refugee, as told through the lens of a white man before something of tangible change occurs in the real world. At what point do these films stop being educational reimaginings and simply remain voyeuristic depictions of refugee trauma? It may be unfair to write off films like Aisha or Limbo just because they were directed by white men, and the positives of these films are clear – neither of these films feels explicitly exploitative. They do in fact showcase just how difficult it is to seek asylum in the West. In interviews, Berry has expressed how hard he and the cast worked to make this film resemble reality as closely as possible, but one can’t help but wonder whether the easiest way to achieve this truthfulness would be through non-fiction. Perhaps this phenomenon of fictionalized refugee stories exposes a gap in the public’s empathy. To reach for fictional stories as opposed to non-fictional recounting or engaging with the real-life issues of actual refugees suggests a need for some kind of distance between the audience and the subject matter. It suggests that audiences only desire to be witnesses to such atrocities if those atrocities exist within the bubble of the fictional world, sparing them the painful act of having to acknowledge the role that their own ignorance plays in this system.
For as long as we have refugees in this world, these stories will remain crucial, but when these films are viewed solely within the context of film festivals and are rarely spoken of beyond, the positives begin and end with the immediate audience reaction. Despite being praised with clichéd adjectives like ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘essential’, these films seem to have little to no impact on wider public discourse around the real-life treatment of refugees, thus raising questions about the point of such a project. When we continuously see a different version of ‘the refugee story’ during every festival run with absolutely no change in the real-life living conditions of actual refugees and asylum seekers, these films begin to feel futile, and when feelings of futility can so easily turn to apathy, the burden falls on our shoulders as viewers to demand more of the industry we are funding.
One way to alleviate such an issue seems undeniably obvious: fund projects and support the work of those with first-hand experience to share their stories in the manner that they choose. The success and critical acclaim of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s 2021 animated documentary film Flee can, in part, be explained by the authenticity at the heart of the film; in capturing his friend’s personal experience fleeing a war-torn country, Rasmussen wasn’t simply projecting his own assumptions onto the story, but rather platforming the lived experience of his close friend for a global audience. Another solution would be to simply demand empathy in response to real events without the requirement of fictionalized stories to cheapen guilt. If our empathy can only be achieved through stories that can be easily digested as ‘fiction’, are we really showing true allegiance to those affected? Or are we simply appeasing a Western desire to embody the role of the savior whilst refusing to address the material conditions of the situation?
It is true that cinema can be a powerful tool for change, but it can just as easily mask complacency as activism. How we yield such a medium, whether or not we make a distinction between voyeurism and activism, and who we allow being in charge of these narratives speaks volumes about what we, as a society, are willing to accept. In the case of ‘refugee films’, it seems that we are still unwilling to accept the role we play in allowing difficult subject matter such as this one to be reduced to cannon fodder for empty gestures and crocodile tears.
