How to help refugees - VPRO documentary - 2015
31The confrontation between our world and that of the refugees has reached a new stage. We can no longer ignore those 'others' and pretend they are not there. But politics does not yet seem to be capable of real solutions. Many citizens no longer want to turn away from the humanitarian disaster and take action themselves. What new ideas and solutions are being developed for the increasing flow of refugees? Dead bodies and crowded boats arrive daily on the European beaches. From the Balkans refugees try to cross the border with Austria on foot. In Calais, attempts are being made every night to reach England.
How can we relate in a constructive way to the tragedies of our time, but especially to each other?
VPRO backlight shows new answers, inspired by both pragmatism and charity, and offers practical tools to every viewer who wants to do something themselves.
Original title: Gimme shelter
VPRO backlight follows initiatives from different people, such as two Amsterdam artists at their shoe collection campaign for Calais. Or an Urk Christian couple who have been sharing their home for more than a year with a fled Iranian Kurd. And Alexander de Groot and fashion designer Bas Timmer, who have a studio in the woods near Enschede where Syrians make the abandoned sleeping bags from the Lowlands music festival into 'Sheltersuits' for refugees who are in camps.
In Germany, where history is concerned, there is a greater pressure on politics from the citizens' initiatives. For example, the Sea-Watch organization travels with a fishing vessel from Harlingen to the Mediterranean Sea to patrol off the coast of Libya, where many more refugees seem to drown than according to official censuses. A German collective offers vacationers a 'starter kit' to take a refugee on the way back in the back seat and in the heart of Berlin once again, refugees who died anonymously at the external borders are being buried.
View more inspiring initiatives, such as Takecare B&B, about accommodation for refugees with private individuals; Universal Unconditional on the lending of citizenship; and the Limbo Embassy, an embassy for encounters with refugees that couldn't get asylum.
Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2015.
© VPRO Backlight October 2015
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Credits:
Director: Bregtje van der Haak
Research: Henneke Hagen and Halil Ozpamuk
Production: Marie Schutgens
Editors: Marije Meerman and Doke Romeijn
English, French and Spanish subtitles: Ericsson.
French and Spanish subtitles are co-funded by European Union.