Migration is one of the hot-button issues of our time, dividing people on TV and mobile screens and at dinner tables and bars in many countries around the world. In the heat of some of the more heated debates, the human stories sometimes may get sidelined, or maybe even forgotten.
Director Marta Bergman’s new feature, migrant drama The Silent Run (L’enfant bélier), which she wrote in collaboration with Camille Mol, Ely Chevillot, and Sacha Ferbus, focuses on such a human gaze.
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Ahead of its world premiere at the Cairo Film Festival on Friday, THR can unveil two exclusive clips for the movie.
“In a van crammed with 20 migrants, the young couple sing a lullaby to their daughter, Klara,” who is two years old, reads a synopsis for the film. “They hope to reach England. Pursued by police vehicles, the smugglers panic. A chase begins. A shot pierces the night.”
Klara’s parents, Sara and Adam, have entered Belgium illegally with her and are trying to reach England in a van with other migrants that is driven by people smugglers. Redouane, a 20-year police veteran who spends his nights chasing smugglers on Belgium’s busy motorway network, also features in the film. “That night, as his team attempts to stop a van suspected of transporting migrants, everything changes,” according to the synopsis.
The film stars Salim Kechiouche, Zbeida Belhajamor, Abdal Razak Alsweha, and Clara Toros. The producers are Cassandre Warnauts, Jean-Yves Roubin, Geneviève Lavoie, and Richard Angers. B-Rated International is handling sales.
Romanian filmmaker Bergman has written and directed several films that explore the boundary between fiction and documentary. Her first feature-length fiction film, Alone at My Wedding, screened at Cannes in 2018 and also featured this hybrid approach.
The Silent Run wants to explore “lives broken by a political system,” she said about the film. “I wanted to question that system and its compromises with the truth – to make a film embodied by complex characters, where the audience would plunge into each person’s contradictions and inner turmoil.” And she “wanted to question, through cinema, our relationship to the other,” she added. “At the risk of dividing audiences, I preferred debate over comfort.”
That is why the movie stays away from painting “a broad, general picture of ‘migrants’ and ‘the police’,” she concluded. Instead, “I wrote the protagonists from the inside — through their desires and struggles.”
The first clip from the film, which THR can now unveil, shows the loving parents as they take a family video with Klara on a mobile phone, followed by some impromptu dancing.
In Clip 2, the mood has darkened. It features much more tense scenes in the van full of migrants, along with a first glimpse of the police in chase mode.
Watch the second clip from The Silent Run here.
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