IN THIS WORLD EXPOSES PEOPLE SMUGGLING
In This World appears to be a documentary of a true story, but in the style of the Blair Witch Project (1999). The plot is about sixteen-year-old orphan Jamal Udin Torabi and his cousin, twentysomething Enayatullah, two Afghan refugees in the Shamshatoo refugee camp of one million Afghan refugees outside Peshawar, Pakistan, who start out in February 2002 to go to London. They are two of some one million refugees around the world each year who pay a sum of money to organizers of a people smuggling operation, that is, an underground railroad for undocumented illegals to go from a very poor country to a First World country. The filming starts with a bus and truck trip from Peshawar to Quetta and on to Iran, though they are sent back by police to Pakistan and then return. Going through Kurdish Iran, they trek on foot through the snow undetected past Iraq to Turkey, and then fit into a container on board a cargo ship from Istanbul to Trieste. Enayatullah and a few others do not survive the container trip for lack of fresh air; they are no longer “in this world.” After arriving in Trieste, Jamal pays for a train ticket to France after stealing from a woman’s purse. Then he lies on a wood plank on the bottom of truck that crosses the chunnel into England and on to London, a trip six months in all. Titles at the end say that Jamal’s application for refugee status is denied, but he is given extraordinary permission to remain temporarily; he must leave England on the day before his eighteenth birthday. Director Michael Winterbottom makes a quiet plea for more acceptance of refugees who flee from hopeless conditions, but his more explicit prayer is that more money should be spent to help the refugees that Jamal left behind, given the $7.9 billion cost of the bombing in the Afghan War that created so many of the Peshawar refugees. MH