Description:
Since
2011, thousands of migrants fleeing wars are trying to cross the
Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. While governments are
criminalizing migratory fluxes, women and men are getting
organized—chartering boats to save the shipwrecked or prosecuting
States for having failed to provide assistance to people in danger.
While governments are more and more criminalizing migratory fluxes,
some women and men are getting —some are chartering boats to save
the shipwrecked. Others are hosting them on land, and yet others are
filing criminal complaints against States for having failed to
provide assistance to people in danger. All these individuals, moved
by determination and courage, are actively offering an alternative to
general indifference. Among them, Charles Heller, a young Swiss
researcher whom, by actively participating to the creation of first
the Watch the Med platform, which documents the disappeared-at-sea
migrants boats cases, and then the emergency phone line AlarmPhone
created for boats in distress, shows us that this is not a fatality.
Not only is it possible to save migrants at sea, but it is also
necessary today to address migrations differently.
Biography: Frédéric
Choffat is a filmmaker of fiction and
documentary, involved for several years on migration issues. These
issues are discussed throughout his works, both photographic, in
Bosnian refugee camps in Croatia in 1993, in A
Short Film Nedjad (Pardino de oro,
Locarno 1998) or feature film, True
Life is Elsewhere, or on stage with
Julie Gilbert, Outrages Ordinary,
which mixes theater and cinema, bluntly telling the tragic fate of
migrants thrown on the roads of exile. He accepts for the first time
in 2015 to make a documentary for television, Brig
Terminus, for the subject proposed
to him—the story of a repressed Syrian
family from Switzerland deserves to be seen by the greatest number.
