Xenos

Crisis meets crisis, refugees meet recession. On a modern odyssey Palestinians are stranded in Athens. Their wandering has led them from a refugee camp in Lebanon, through Syria and Turkey to the Greece of the Euro crisis – a haven that turns out not to be substantially calmer than the sea.

Mahdi Fleifel shows in Xenos how war and crisis, conflicts in the Middle East and economic recession converge. Fleifel gives these topics, which have long become a standard daily news item, a human face: flight from war and violence ends in a place, where not even stealing is profitable, whose residents have to struggle for day-to-day survival and where drugs are the only way to cope with everyday life.

For twelve minutes the film documents hopelessness, damaged bodies and souls. Against becoming used to the background noise of ever new crises and anticlimaxes, which dominate news coverage, Xenos sets the interference on recorded telephone conversations and the image noise of dim night shots – evidence of the refugee’s everyday life. The collapse of personal dreams, the family’s disappointed wishes, drug addiction and prostitution – the protagonists are in a struggle with all this. In Xenos all of this is gathered together in a document about the clash of crises. (Jan Harms)

* We can only show an excerpt of this work in the online archive. For the complete version, please contact the artist and Nakba FilmWorks.