[screenings] World Refugee Day

We can all be refugees
Sometimes it only takes a day,
Sometimes it only takes a handshake
Or a paper that is signed.
We all came from refugees
Nobody simply just appeared,
Nobody's here without a struggle,
And why should we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere.

- Benjamin Zepheniah, We Refugees

Godforsaken room with a lizard on the wall. Godforsaken city where strange mongrels chase strange cars at strange hours. Godforsaken streets where you wonder why the commonest crow seems unfamiliar. Godforsaken signs that seem to point the wrong way up and the left way right. Godforsaken depots and train stations where old man Time sits still, frailer than ever, leaning against the wall, readjusting his watch. Godforsaken skies above like an expertly painted infinity staring down at you.

For the seekers of vague entities and ephemeral presences and fragmented meanings, there is the twilight hour at dusk when the vagueness is at its most tangible, at best the smoke out of the ashtray or a few strains of the blues from the radio next door. Stare if you will at the alien expanse that lies before with the gaze of Ulysses at the bow of his ship, the gaze of the exile, always homebound and therefore always adrift. If the weather is right, you will spot the gods in their disguise. A few minutes later the stars come out and before you know, the night arrives tiptoeing in plain sight.

If the statistics are to be believed the multitudes of the displaced, lost and searching are higher than ever before in the history of man. And below the statistics of the visible, the teeming invisibles clamour for the right to merely exist. UN declares the 20th of June, 2010 as ‘World Refugee Day’. We acknowledge, abide, remember and stand in solidarity because while the refugee may connote many things, it is foremost a human condition as a symptom of the soul.


20th June, 2010 6:30pm

In Search of My Home (30min) Dir: Rintu Thomas & Sushmit Ghosh
(global premiere)


In the world’s largest democracy, live thousands of men, women and children with lost homes and forgotten names. Sheltering one of the largest refugee populations in the world, India still lacks a comprehensive domestic refugee law, that could guarantee them their basic human needs and a life of dignity. In Search of My Home is a journey with a Burmese and an Afghan refugee family, as it explores the complexities in their everyday battle for survival. Hope and despair, love and loss come together in a story never told before; a tale absent from India’s collective conscience and its mainstream media. In Search of My Home, is having a simultaneous global premiere on 20th June, 2010 and BFS is proud to host the film in Bangalore.

Paradise: Three Journeys in This World (51min) Dir: Elina Hirvonen

Paradise - Three Journeys In This World is a poetic documentary. In the first journey we travel along the route of tomato trucks to Almeria, Spain, where illegal immigrants from Africa work in greenhouses. The second journey takes us to Morocco, where numerous immigrants are willing to do anything to get to Europe. We meet Adam, who has escaped war in the Ivory Coast. Now he is living in hiding along with numerous other refugees and immigrants and constantly fearing violence from local authorities. The third journey takes us through the desert to Bakary Fofana’s home village on the border of Mali and Mauritania where the desert is believed to ruin the possibility of human life in the village within the next few decades.

Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road cross, Op. State Bank of India

Tel: 25493705/9886213516