THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

IN THIS WORLD

Title: In This World
Year of Release: 2002
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Country of Production: Britain
Principal Boy Actors: Jamal Udin Torabi (as Jamal).
Genre: Docudrama
Length: 1 hr 26 min
Language: Several languages, including Dari, Pashto and English
Availability: official DVD release
English subtitles: included on the DVD

Synopsis
The film begins in the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Peshawar on the North West frontier of Pakistan, where young Jamal lives. The camp contains 53,000 refugees, of which the latest wave resulted from the US bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001. An estimated 7.9 billion dollars was spent on the bombing campaign. Spending on the refugees, as the opening narration laconically observes, is somewhat less generous: besides a barely adequate daily food ration, each family is given a tent, a stove, three blankets, and a plastic sheet. Jamal works at a brickworks, for which he is paid less than a dollar a day.

Naturally, many of the inmates want to leave the camp. A young man, Enayatulah, decides to make the illegal trip to London in search of a better life, and Jamal is chosen to accompany him due to his facility with the English language. Paying people smugglers to take them over the borders, the camera follows them on their perilous journey.

The actors are mostly non-professionals who essentially play themselves. Jamal was a real Afghan refugee; and, after he received his pay for being in this film, Jamal's widowed mother decided that the best way to spend it was to try to get him back to Britain. So Jamal returned to London before his visa ran out, and applied for asylum. Although he was granted exceptional leave to remain for the next couple of years, his asylum application was refused, meaning that he was required to leave before his eighteenth birthday. What happened to him subsequently appears unknown.

French Cinema Lobby Cards (from Editor's personal collection)

Screenshots