Coming to theatres today, Friday, December 18: THOSE WHO FEEL THE FIRE BURNING
Morgan Knibbe’s meditation on life and death in refugee limbo debuted at IDFA last year. The doc went on to screen at True/False, Thessaloniki Doc, Hot Docs, Docs Against Gravity, Sarajevo, and AFI Fest, among other events.
Knibbe brings a bold visual style to his experimental hybrid film, which offers the subjective experience of a disembodied migrant who dies in his perilous attempt to crossover into Europe. Through his imagined perspective, the viewer is presented with a multiplicity of experiences of others who made it, but who have found something far different from the promised land of their hopes: loneliness, despair, drug addiction, poverty, and frustration. Intentionally fragmented, Knibbe’s project encourages disorientation if not outright confusion – given the topic, this works both for and against it, plunging the viewer into parallel situations with its various subjects, but also often eschewing the context that could make its episodes more compelling. Traditionalists will likely find it more frustrating than successful, but the film certainly demonstrates a director with talent.
what (not) to doc 