On Shores Far Away

The discussion which followed last night’s screening of “Shores far away”, Savyasaachi Jain’s documentary account of the lives of irregular migrants as they journey between northern India and Europe raised interesting points about the way campaigners for social reform can regard film as a medium portraying complex realities.

Jain chose to construct his film around several dozen personal accounts of the experiences of irregular migration, most coming from the migrants but with a view voices of ‘official’ society – lawyers, police officials and civil servants – who in different ways gain intimate knowledge of these undocumented lives.

The result is a grimly realistic and sometimes harrowing film which is relieved only by the capacity of the informants to make a joke out of the experience of going ‘donki’ through Russia and the Ukraine, and the songs and philosophies they spin in an attempt to retain some sense of narrative and agency in their  unfolding fate.  In discussion with the audience which followed the film, Jain assured us that he played no role in framing these tales of hardship and the men (in this case the migrants were all men) spoke in their own voices order to convey a message that they thought their peers back home ought to hear.

Interestingly the London audience, consisting of people who were obviously supporters of the rights of migrants, wondered whether this was a message that ought to be aired more widely in the conditions of the UK.  There was a suggestion that the naive openness of the migrants about their dreams of a good life, fleeing mere poverty as opposed to brutal oppression, would reinforce fears of a tsunami-like inflow of desperate people if these sorts of reasons were ever conceded as justifiable grounds to move across continents.

In the UK we often find ourselves asking ‘what would be the effect if this was shown on the BBC?’ and using this as a standard for judging whether the item under consideration is to be considered a good piece of work or not.  This perhaps shows the way in which the measured and refined tones of BBC narrators have come to constitute the voice of authority even for those who consider themselves anti-establishment radicals, but it also brings with it the danger that we end up favouring a type of story-telling which only allows the migrant to appear in the tale as tragic victim, or possibly tragic hero, but always as tragic and generally without much control over their fate.

My feeling at the end of the discussion last night was that if we really are committed to bringing migrant voices into the centre of the public conversation we should not blanche if the accounts they offer would be likely to trouble a BBC audience.  There is a pressing need for a large degree of committed truth-saying in the debates that whirl through the electronic agoras of our modern lives and we should be prepared to claim authenticity for what we say about these things, and be ready to cite the frank and open accounts provided by migrants as the best evidence for what the world is really like.  We should have confidence that a narrative which draws more deeply on the well-springs of real life will, eventually, trump one that is spun out of a tissue of superficial incomprehension and downright lies.

But having said this it is fair to acknowledge that there is no positive virtue in directly provoking audiences which feel more comfortable with BBC-style outlooks, particularly if we have better things to do with our time. From that standpoint, as Jain himself said, maybe ‘Shores far away’ would not do its best work on a prime time slot just after Eastenders. 

One good thing to do with our time then is to make more films (or radio programmes, or write more novels, etc, etc) which will be regarded as useful, insightful, realistic and realistic amongst audiences made up of scores or possibly hundreds of people, rather than the millions who tune into nightly television broadcasts, and aim for the time being to offer those who have the potential to be receptive to the complex and difficult issues which arise when we listen to the messages which migrants want to get across to anyone who will listen to them. 

At the conference on migrants and the media at the University of East London early this year, Aine O’Brien, of the Dublin-based organisation FOMACS suggested that, as well as facilitating migrant voices, we should be working equally hard to promote ‘intelligent hearing’ on the part of the people who are doing the listening. There is no great mystery about what would be required to do this: for a start it would mean working with audiences who we know have a reason to go beyond the banal representations of migrant lives and who are prepared to allow their understanding to develop through conversation and engagement.  The steps that would follow on once this start has been made are bound to take us directions which, even if currently unknowable, are certainly going to be more rewarding.