Attenborough Advocates
Event: Outdoor Film Screening
Despite the circumstances surrounding the al-Hindawi family’s move to the UK, the exhibition challenges stereotypical images of refugees and asylum seekers in the mainstream media by displaying playful pictures celebrating family bonds, exploring new beginnings, and their evolving relationships with friends, neighbours, and culture. To continue these themes, the advocates settled on Paddington as their film choice for an outdoor movie screening.
Paddington
Genre: Family, Fantasy, Comedy.
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
After an earthquake destroys his home, a young Peruvian bear travels to London in search of a new home. Lost and alone at Paddington station, he meets the Brown family who invite him to temporarily stay with them. Whilst winning the hearts of this family, he also attracts the attention of a museum taxidermist.
Why did you choose this film:
Much like the al-Hindawi family, Paddington finds himself in a new country and he has to navigate his way through a culture that differs to what he’s heard. We see Paddington struggle to settle into an environment that he is not used to and how he suffers from feelings of displacement even within the company of a loving family. The blending of cultures is also reflected in Paddington with him teaching one of the children to speak his language much like the use of Arabic and English within the exhibition.
Film Recommendations
Kannathil Muthamittal, 2002 (A peck on the cheek)
Genre: Action, Drama, War
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
Follows the emotional journey of an adopted little girl who travels back to her war ridden birth country, Sri Lanka, to find answers about where she comes from and who her biological mother is.
Why did you choose this film:
‘This film showcases the hardship of forced migration and the aftermath of war’.
Families in war are often forced to make sacrifices and face difficult separations. This movie reflects some of the stories in ‘In Which Language Do We Dream’ of the al-Hindawi family as their extended relatives are all divided across several countries. However, in present day the al-Hindawi family are able to maintain contact using modern day technology and stay up to date with family news and milestones.
Limbo (2020)
Genre: Drama
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
An offbeat observation of the refugee experience. On a fictional remote Scottish island, a group of new arrivals await the results of their asylum claims. Among them is Omar, a young Syrian musician burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud, which he has carried all the way from his homeland.
Announcing the arrival of a major homegrown talent in filmmaker Ben Sharrock, Limbo is a deadpan delight bursting with humanity. Illuminating the hopes and hardships of the refugee experience, this wry, poignant, and bracingly funny ode to the kindness of strangers is the British film of the year.
Why did you choose this film:
The film gives an insight into some of the experiences that asylum seekers and refugees face after arriving in the UK, and the cultural differences they have to navigate. The main character is a Syrian refugee, who struggles to keep in touch with his family, some of whom are in Turkey and others who chose to remain in Syria. It is also interesting in its portrayal of the local residents of the Scottish island, and their differing responses to their new neighbours.
Minari
Genre: Drama
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
This story follows a Korean family who begin life on a farm in 1980s rural Arkansas. However, new challenges start cropping up as the family navigates cultural unease, fleeting hopes, and constant threat of financial disaster.
Why did you choose this film:
This movie explores how creating a new home comes with constant challenges and sacrifices that is continuous in the background of building a family life. There is also an added insight into how different generations navigate the same situations.
Bend It Like Beckham (2002)
Genre: Rom Com
Where you can watch: Prime Video, Disney +
Summary:
A comedy portrayal of a young girl navigating her cultural ties to her Punjabi family and life as a teenager in London. Following her passion for playing football, the main lead finds herself joining a local football team without her parents’ approval and tries to work around different situations that crop up due to the cultural clashes.
Why did you choose this film:
This film, although a light-hearted portrayal, shows the different experiences first generation immigrants go through to balance the cultural/traditional expectations from older generations and the identity they developed in a culture different to their parents. This movie perfectly shows the generational gap that develops as immigrant families or refugees settle in a new country and try to build a new life.
Lion (2016)
Genre: Biography, Drama
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
Based on the best-selling novel A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley, Lion follows Saroo on his journey to find his family after being adopted by an Australian family at the age of 5. Growing up in Australia, Saroo always felt like a part of him was missing and 25 years after being taken from India, Saroo is on a mission to find his family by using Google Earth to locate his village.
Why did you choose this film:
Whilst the al-Hindawi family left Syria for their own safety and to better their circumstances, there are parallels to what Saroo experienced prior to his adoption. After being separated by his family at the age of 5, Saroo was living off the streets until he was taken by an orphanage. Both stories note the difficulties surrounding being separated from your family and the fear of the unknown regarding what has happened to them during their absence. Lion really promotes the importance of family which I think really relates to the message the al-Hindawi family conveys through this exhibition.
Leave No Trace (2018)
Genre: Adventure, Drama
Where you can watch: Prime Video, YouTube
Summary:
A father and daughter are living off grid in a state of continual flight from society. The film questions what drives their need for such a radical and secretive lifestyle: are they forging an Edenic existence or afraid of something? As contact with the outside world becomes increasingly inevitable, the pair question what’s best for them together and individually.
Why did you choose this film:
Like the exhibition, Leave No Trace considers the nature of home. Is home made up of people, places, a specific lifestyle, or a set of traditions and behaviours? It also looks at the pain and joys that can come with leaving home, whether out of necessity or desire, and how new homes can be found.
A Bread Factory (2018) (in two parts)
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
The Bread Factory, a community arts centre, navigates the pressures and uncertainties of making small-scale art for everyone in contemporary New York. The first instalment sees the centre struggle for the funding it needs to survive and the second documents a wacky production of Euripides’ Hecuba.
Why did you choose this film:
It shows the importance of art that relates to everyday experiences and that fun and hardship can coexist. Hecuba, the play they stage in part two, is a classical story of life after home has been destroyed by war: it becomes a vehicle to explore the community’s sense of humour and compassion for each other.
Oranges and Sunshine
Genre: Biography, History
Where you can watch: Prime Video, Netflix
Summary:
The film is based on the true story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham who uncovered the scandal of “home children” – a scheme of forcibly relocating poor children from the United Kingdom to Australia and Canada. Margaret then devotes her time to reuniting estranged families, who are situated in Australia and the UK.
Deported children were promised oranges and sunshine, but they got hard labour and life in institutions such as Keaney College in Bindoon, Western Australia. Many were given to the Congregation of Christian Brothers, where they suffered physical and sexual abuse.
Why did you choose this film:
I feel this film shows the importance of knowing where you come from to know who you are, and that you can find family throughout your life – that being loved and belonging, and healing is a life-long journey and it’s never too late.
Human Flow
Genre: Documentary
Where you can watch: Prime Video
Summary:
Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Human Flow gives a powerful visual expression to this massive human migration. Captured over the course of an eventful year in 23 countries, the film follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretches across the globe in countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, and Turkey. Human Flow is a witness to its subjects and their desperate search for safety, shelter and justice: from teeming refugee camps to perilous ocean crossings to barbed-wire borders; from dislocation and disillusionment to courage, endurance and adaptation; from the haunting lure of lives left behind to the unknown potential of the future.
Why did you choose this film:
The film is a documentary directed by artist Ai Weiwei and I think the footage is authentic, as is this exhibition which Rich Wiles filmed and documented with his family.
It fits with the themes that the exhibition wants to explore: identity, displacement, integration and family issues, and with the exhibition’s vision of amplifying the voices and perspectives of the refugee experience and challenging viewers’ perceptions of refugees.
The exhibition tells the story of a Syrian family’s first-hand experience of displacement, integration and return home, which I see as a small family in a larger context, and through this film we can see what is being experienced from 23 countries, helping the viewer to understand the subject in a global perspective.