HOLD ON REVIEW – Horrific death of 2-year-old puts immigration crackdown in the spotlight | film

HAn insightful, but perhaps oblique, Belgian documentary sets itself an ambitious goal: to expose the hidden infrastructure of state coercion that underpins European migration policy, even to the point of using reductive language like “migrant.” The book arrives at these abstractions through the horrific story of the murder of Mawada Shourie, a two-year-old German-born Iraqi Kurdish girl who was shot during a botched border control raid on the truck she was traveling in with her parents.

Director Robin VanBiesen reveals this tragedy through documents and testimonies that are read to the audience of activists shown here. The infant’s body was thrown into a garbage bag by superior officers, and her parents, Frast and Shamden, refused access to her; the lies of the police, who played on the myth of immigrant barbarism by claiming that fellow passengers had been lovingly dumped on the highway; The justice system has joined forces by holding the truck driver responsible for the dangerous behavior that supposedly forced the police officer to shoot.

Clearly, anger is the correct response. But as someone here points out, focusing on such terrible events is to the authorities’ advantage, because they are the outlying exceptions that are often used to justify strict control. It obscures the broader machinery of oppression, and the underlying ideologies of power, that allow empowered people to pull the trigger. Another commentator draws comparisons with the anthropology of hunting: myths that distinguish between hunter and prey and punish bloodshed. Deconstructing violence means deconstructing language; Replacing labels such as “migrant” or “refugee” leads another participant to realize that searching for alternative terms always leads to the humanization of the people involved.

However, it is not as if Vanbesian found his own lexicon for the visual element of this revolution. His distorted sequences of Belgian highways, as if heading towards the 2001 Stargate, are not a bad attempt to convey interstitial alienation – but the numerous insertions of fluttering roadside plants and lampposts are ultimately dull. Lyrically the film inhabits this no man’s land while anonymously conveying its ideas through staged readings, and ironically the film begins to feel uprooted and fragmented. A fully attributed testimony and austere conclusion to the tale of affection, rather than a healing session of throat singing, might have closed the episode better. The radical intent is clear to see, but the anger seems to fall by the wayside.

Hold On to It is showing on True Story starting February 6.