How to Please & Nightwatchers

Programme

• How to Please

  Wed Al-Asadi, having fled the civil war in Iraq, applies for asylum in Finland. Although his lawyer is confident that he will receive a residence permit, his request is rejected. Wed appeals. He makes use of the long waiting time to integrate into Finnish society, as far as he is allowed to. He finds a job as a cook, applies for a work permit and tries to get an education. Ironically, all this turns out to work against him in his asylum procedure. It also transpires that he can’t be sent back to Iraq, because the country refuses to cooperate in the return of refugees.
  
  In How to Please, Wed tells his story on a minimal set: on a black studio floor, open structures of coloured beams form the different rooms in which he is interrogated by an AI voice, and where he is obliged to wait and hope. It looks like a human-sized mousetrap— fitting for an asylum procedure that leads Wed from pillar to post, and to the point of despair.

• Nightwatchers

  When night falls in the picturesque French ski resort of Montgenèvre, the mountains become the setting for a desperate game of cat-and-mouse. Nighttime is when small groups of migrants trek from Italy to France across the snowy Alps, all the while being hunted by the border police. A team of volunteers and members of Doctors Without Borders try to provide help where they can. In the darkness they scour the slopes searching for stragglers and strays—for pregnant women, young children with no parents, the sick—whose willingness to face the perilous nocturnal journey across the ice betrays their desperation.
  
  The prevailing emotion among the volunteers is one of outrage at the system. How did it come this far, that asylum seekers have to make such inhumane decisions? The camera follows the aid workers closely for a single night—the horror stories told by refugees in whispered voices contrast starkly with the idyllic moonlit landscape. Several of them recount in voice-over the hardships they have endured on their sometimes years-long trek to join Europe.