Re:fuge! Zu:flucht! Four Days of Films about Migration and Escape

Refugees make their way to Europe every day. In crowded, often hardly seaworthy boats, they try to make the journey across the water, with countless people dying during the dangerous passage. In the meantime, the EU is sealing off its borders more and more effectively. Drawing on the latest technology, Europe watches over the Mediterranean region with drones and satellites with the help of the Eurosur program – border protection is being further expanded and partially farmed out to North Africa.

Although the tragedies of sunken refugee ships such as the one before Lampedusa in October 2013 do at least make the headlines for a short time and generate awareness, political responses and humanitarian solutions have thus far failed to appear. An important reform of EU refugee policy with a central focus on the "responsibility to protect" and human rights still remains far away from this "space of freedom, security and justice". We need images that begin beyond the sea, images that take a look at the centrifugal forces of armed conflict, at places of transit and at the companions in fate brought together by such processes. Narrations that report on the borders before Europe and question why people set out to breach them. Films about people, goals and hopes, about day-to-day realities in European cities, about the heroes of the monotonous everyday and about flights embarked on in handcuffs. With four days of films about migration and escape from October 6 to 9 at the Arsenal cinema and a panel discussion about humane European refugee policy on October 9 at the Heinrich Böll Foundation offices, the Heinrich Böll Foundation takes a differentiated look at the realities and spaces both this side and the other side of the shared sea.