On Hold
Returning after his 2015 debut feature Pikadero, British filmmaker Ben Sharrock offers a new perspective on the ongoing refugee crisis with a sensitive, offbeat portrait of asylum seekers in an unusual, almost dystopian version of contemporary Scotland. Caitlin Quinlan interviews Sharrock to find out more about deadpan humour, absurd real-life policymaking and the singular talent of Amir El-Masry.
A young man stands in a phone booth on the side of the road, beside grassy marshes and watery peat bogs. Others around him await their turn, eager for their chance to hear the warm familiarity of their loved ones’ voices down the line from miles and miles away. In Limbo, the second feature by writer/director Ben Sharrock, waiting is all anyone can do; these men are asylum seekers, with their applications to stay in Scotland still processing and their lives stuck in an aimless, lonely purgatory.
Sharrock’s film, with deadpan humour and formal inventiveness, sets out to offer an alternative to the narratives of life as a refugee often deployed in other forms of media. A quietly profound lead performance by Amir El-Masry as Omar grounds the film with deep tenderness, while an eccentric cast of supporting characters offer lightness and balance. The filmmaker is adept at handling these dualities with care and control, keeping the film, as much as the characters, in a controlled limbo of its own. On the boundary between comedy and severity, hope and despair, refuge and danger, the wait for resolution goes on.
Massive Cinema: How do you see your role as the director for a film about this topic, something that is not your lived experience?
Ben Sharrock: My connection to the subject goes back such a long way with the time that I spent living in Syria, and there’s so many parts of my journey to this from working in the refugee camps. But it's not a lived experience of mine so I think that really is the job of a writer, to be able to access experiences that go beyond your own. But that comes with a massive responsibility. Yes, I had these experiences built into my backstory but then it was really about trying to do justice to the subject matter. Spending the time on the research, speaking to people that have been through the asylum system and speaking to NGOs that work with refugees on a day to day basis, and I think being very clear about the things I didn't want to do, like including a Western character as a vehicle to tell the story about refugees, or sensationalising the subject and making it about the story of the journey, or the story of the tragic side of being a refugee.
It was about making a film about refugees that isn't really about refugees at all. It's just about people and no matter where you're from or what your background is you can relate to these people on screen because a lot of this is about identity, and family, and loss, these things that are universal. Also, we're always on the side of the refugee characters. We're taking this journey with them, and we're on their side. It's about feeling that level of responsibility and doing the work that's required to try and be an authority on something that isn't a lived experience of your own.
I was really struck by the visual language of the film, particularly the textural elements and granular details that appear in close-ups – whether grass, sea, or a patterned window.
The cinematic form and the language of the imagery are really important to me. The point where I start in the process is really thinking about it from a linguistic point of view, so it's trying to bring as much language into each composition as possible. The roads, for example, are roads but then they become more about Omar’s journey. The horizon line on Uist was something that we were really attracted to because you can see these roads that seem to go on forever, but you can't see where they lead.
Or the way that the elements on the island are feeding into Omar's emotional state and how those elements and the seasons change throughout the film. We often marginalised him in the frame as well, to create that feeling of isolation and alienation. Even with the glass that you mentioned, the starting point for me is thinking, “What is this scene saying? What does it need to do and how can we do that visually?” So, let's fragment Farhad through the glass so we can create this feeling of him being fragmented and we can say so much with that. I think that's just very much part of the process, looking at it from a formalistic and linguistic point of view that builds and builds throughout.
“There’s a lot of absurdity in the real life policymaking of European governments.”
I wanted to ask about the film’s dry humour, and why that tone felt like the right vehicle for this story.
It's very integral to my filmmaking—what I'm interested in is looking at political subject matter, and often serious subject matter, and using humour as a way of speaking about something much bigger but also putting that subject into the backdrop. On one hand, I knew I wanted to make a film about this subject matter and I was always going to try and use humour to do that. On the other hand, it was a massive process and it's very difficult to balance that tone. Part of that came from the research and speaking to people that have been through the asylum system and asking them permission to use humour with this subject.
I wanted to use humour because it's integral to me but also because making a film about this subject, ultimately, I felt like it had to do something different to what other media was doing. It had to do something that maybe documentary can't do, it had to do something different from what other films were doing, and had to do something that you're not going to read in a book or read in a newspaper article because ultimately the aim is to get people to see this and connect with the subject matter. So it felt like humour was a really useful device to do that, like a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
Some scenarios in the film seem so absurd that they must ultimately be true. Was anything based on the real-life experiences of refugees you spoke with?
The unfortunate thing is that most of it is based on reality, so while there's some creative licence to heighten the humour and the absurdity, the cultural awareness classes are based on real cultural awareness classes that take place in different European countries. The one that I saw was in Norway or Finland where they were teaching refugees how to go to clubs and explaining how to approach a woman in a club. I saw a class in Germany which taught refugees how to flirt with German girls. These classes are compulsory in Finland and Norway, and you can see how offended the refugees were. It takes their dignity away.
A lot of these things are based on reality, even the sharing of the coat between Farhad and Omar. Even talking about the concept itself of this island, which was originally an absurdist idea, and now we're hearing from Priti Patel this idea of setting up an offshore, remote colonial outpost to hold asylum seekers while they wait for the claims. Even ideas of abandoned oil rigs are being floated around. So there's a lot of absurdity in the real life policymaking of European governments.
What did Amir El-Masry bring to the role of Omar and what did you most enjoy about his performance?
There's not a huge amount of dialogue in the film and I knew that we wanted to have a lot of long takes just on his face. I knew that we needed someone that could hold the camera, that could hold the audience in the palm of their hand with just the depth of emotion, that containment of emotion, but someone that could also carry all of those things inside and communicate that through his performance in such a way where he's not giving the audience all of the answers.
He's bringing the audience closer and closer to him, and making the audience want to know what he's thinking. And to be interested enough to stay there and wonder what he's thinking and to feel and breathe with him. Amir was really unique in being able to do that and being able to carry the film in that way and have that style of performance, that containment. He did so much for his role—he learnt the Oud, he did a lot of work to learn the Syrian dialect as well. He was also such a pleasure to work with because we got on really well, so we had this very close relationship that was based on this trust between us.
How did you come to the idea of using a remote Scottish island as a purgatory space?
Going back to the point where I was starting to think about this film I had some images in my head of the landscape, the arctic environment, and this battle against the elements and how a landscape could alienate this character. Then there were two realities that came up in the research: one, that refugees were sent to some of the Scottish islands but they already had refugee status so it's very different to what we're seeing in the film, because the characters are asylum seekers and they can’t integrate into society in the same way.
And then the other reality was that it's quite common in a lot of European countries for asylum seekers to be sent to remote communities to wait for their asylum claims. Then the island became a metaphor for purgatory, rather than being about a reality. I went out to Uist to write the screenplay, because I wanted to really try and discover a remote Scottish island and then started to see how visually we could create this purgatorial story from the island.
Limbo is released in UK cinemas via MUBI on July 30
Caitlin Quinlan is a freelance film writer from London with work published for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, and the Financial Times. She programmes women-led film events with the Bechdel Test Fest and is a member of the London Critics’ Circle.