In her luggage, when she crossed the Quebec border at Roxham Road, Patricia had 17 years of life in Uganda, $ 30 in her pockets, some clothes, a passport and a notebook. It is on this heritage that she tries to rebuild, alone, her new life in Quebec, after having fled her country. There, her parents ruled that she was in danger, after someone reported her bisexuality to the authorities.
Patricia is one of three people we follow in the feature documentary Alone, by Paul Tom, who is showing this week as part of the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal. Like Patricia, Alain and Afshin arrived in the country without parents when they were children. And it is also alone that they have undertaken to build their lives here.
Their case is not isolated, moreover. Some 400 children are said to arrive in the country unaccompanied each year, fleeing countries where they are threatened.
At child height
“Often, parents don’t have the money to move the whole family,” Paul Tom said in an interview. The director, who is also a cameraman and editor, was approached by the two screenwriters Julie Boisvert and Karine Dubois to make this film. It must be said that the experience of immigration is familiar to him, he who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Cambodian parents. Immigration at child level was at the heart of another of his documentaries, Luggage.
It was to prevent their 14-year-old son Afshin from going to war against Iraq that his parents decided to send him to Canada. And the account of his journey from Iran so far is worthy of a thriller. He tells for example how, arrested at the borders of Turkey, he was finally saved by an Iraqi controller. He will also live in total destitution in Greece, waiting for the smuggler, after having spent all the money that his father had entrusted to him. On the plane to Canada, he has to tear up his fake passport and make it disappear in the toilet of the plane.
All these scenes obviously could not be filmed. The film is therefore largely based on an entire animation drawn by Mélanie Baillairgé. These scenes are interspersed with interviews and sequences shot in Quebec with the protagonists.
A past that is erased
It is also one of the strengths of the film, to show so clearly the divide between the past life of refugees and their present in Canada. In Mélanie Baillairgé’s drawings are represented all these moments left behind, these faces that have disappeared from everyday life, these mothers and fathers that we never see again. “The transmission of knowledge does not take place smoothly,” when there is a break in life stories, says Paul Tom.
Alain was 13 when he fled Burundi, where his father was imprisoned for an attempted coup. Harassed by threats, her mother took her three children with her to settle in a refugee camp in Kenya. It was there that she died after a few months, leaving her children orphans.
Arrived in Canada, Alain works hard to become a police officer. And the film shows how, after several attempts to join a police force, he is finally admitted to the police force in Toronto.
The experiences recounted here are positive, despite the tattered lives these refugees have left behind. “I don’t think these are all happy stories, but we took this angle to emphasize the duty of hospitality,” says Paul Tom.
They are vulnerable children who have nothing. What drives them is hope. Hope, that beautiful thing that moves mountains, they’ve got it.
The latter says he wanted to show how caring people can make all the difference in the lives of these children. This is true for the Iraqi controller Afshin met on his way, but it is also true for the interveners of the PRAIDA group, who accompany the newly arrived refugees to Montreal.
The refugees presented here “met generous people, who took care of them,” Paul Tom emphasizes.
“They are vulnerable children, who have nothing,” adds the director. “What drives them is hope. Hope, that beautiful thing that moves mountains, they’ve got it. “