Each year 400,000 people from Africa, Asia and Middle East try to enter Europe. They flee from war, persecution and poverty. Since the ways by land have been interrupted, they board overloaded vessels and face a dangerous and often deadly voyage across the Mediterranean.

Italian filmmaker Fabio Palmieri’s release of his celebrated short Irregulars, is a chance to re-engage with this on-going catastrophe, refugees. The story of Cyrille, told in his own voice, this unique short pairs powerful personal testimony with a fascinating visual framing, breaking through the media noise via the strength of this metaphorical juxtaposition.

Palmieri met Cyrille in a park in Milan and his story was so touching that he felt the need and the urgency to document it. Since Cyrille was afraid that his family would see how sad and desperate he was, he didn’t want to appear in the film, so Palmieri just recorded his voice. The question subsequently arose in Palmieri’s mind: “But what could I show instead of a blank black screen?”

The answer proved simple, but profound. Palmieri substituted the missing footage of his subject with images from a mannequin factory, a poignant visual metaphor for dehumanization. We witness seas of identical all-too-human faces lining the wall, and crowds of bodies in varying states of completion littering the factory floors, standing in for the waves of immigrants. It is not only dehumanization, but de-personalization that Palmieri is invoking, and the two go hand in hand—the obliteration of identifying differentiation is the kind of violence we do linguistically when we use blanket terms like “refugee”.

This congruous pairing of images and voice helps sustain audience attention by making the images not only intellectually stimulating, but by connecting them to the narrative itself. And goodness, the narrative is gripping.

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