Doc-lovers! Bertha Dochouse are hosting their first ever short film screening – check out the programme for this week below…

Tuesday 8th September sees DocHouse’s very first short film screening, The Land Between Us, and one of many more to come! In the hopes of becoming, not only the centre for documentary in London, but a new platform for emerging filmmakers and those honing their craft, Bertha DocHouse are thrilled to join the ranks of the capital’s short film enthusiasts.

Join them on Tuesday 8th September at 6:30pm for a series of immersive short films that look beneath the surface of global diaspora and ‘migration’ to Europe. Today, there are over 250 million international migrants and 750 million internally displaced people across the globe. This means there are close to one billion scattered peoples who have broken ties with their homelands in search of a better life. The Land Between Us explores the lives of those who are forced to seek refuge in countries that deliver few promises and little respite from the past.

What we discover is a phenomenon that transcends not only borders, but boundaries of time and memory, and asks us to consider, in whose country do any of us really belong?

Including films from award-winning directors Marc Silver, Morgan Knibbe and Mahdi Fleifel.

Programme

Xenos

Dir. Mahdi Fleifel / UK – Greece / 2013 / 12’

Xenos (Greek: ξένος, xénos) stranger, enemy, alien. In 2010, Abu Eyad and other youngPalestinian men from the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon travelled with smugglers through Syria and Turkey into Greece. Like so many other migrants, they came looking for a way into Europe but found themselves trapped in a country undergoing economic, political, and social collapse.

The Call

Dir. Reber Dosky / Netherlands / 2013 / 25’

Twenty five years ago, Habib and his family were forced to flee their native village in southeast Turkey and move to Istanbul. They were one of thousands whose villages were destroyed in the Turkish army’s attempt to suppress Kurdish resistance. After twenty years Habib returned to his homeland village to resume his former life, without his family. The Call symbolises a paternal longing for his eldest son to join him in the land of his ancestors – a land that has little significance to his children after growing up in the city.

A Life on Hold

Dir. Marc Silver & Nick Francis / UK / 2013 / 6’

When war broke out in Libya in 2011, thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, who were living in or transiting through the country at the time, were forced to flee for their lives yet again. Life on Hold is an intimate portrait of Omar, a 17 year old Somalian stranded in a refugee camp on the border between Libya and Tunisia. Awaiting a chance to start his life again in a safe country, he first has to watch as his friends move on without him.

Jungle Life

Dir. Dave Young / UK / 2015 / 8’

Today, an estimated 5,000 migrants displaced from countries including Syria, Libya and Eritrea are believed to be camped in and around Calais. At least nine have died whilst trying to make the crossing into Britain since June. Filmmaker Dave Young takes us inside Calais’s largest make-shift camp “The Jungle”, home to a diverse community of displaced people, who are given the chance to tell their own stories.

Shipwreck

Dir. Morgan Knibbe / Netherlands / 2014 / 15’

On October 3rd 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and vividly remembers the nightmarish experience. Meanwhile at the harbour, we are plunged deep into the chaos, as hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship.

Still Life

Dir. Diana Keown Allan / Lebanon – USA / 2007 / 25’

“The Arab governments pushed us out of our homes… I was twelve years old… I’ve been here for 60 years.” Palestine as it was before 1948 has ceased to exist; Acre is no longer a Palestinian port and the other histories of this city now circulate as highly personal, scattered memories. Still Life is a mesmerising and hypnotic film examining the importance that a few very worn photos play in the life of Said, an elderly Palestinian now living in Lebanon. It is a moving meditation on the role memory plays in the lives of those uprooted by conflict and in exile from their homeland.