Given that the British Red Cross has slammed Britain’s little archipelago of lock-ups for immigrants, and given that the government seems to have upped its xenophobia of late, this fictional look inside an immigration detention centre lands at a helpful time.
It’s based, surprisingly enough, on the personal immigration experiences of producer Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, who here writes and directs her first feature. The length of the movie – a natty 80 minutes – reminded me at first of the BBC’s Play for Today strand of many aeons past, as did its TV-style 4-by-3 aspect ratio, its social-justice leaning and the fact that it’s funded by, well, the BBC.
But Gharoro-Akpojotor incrementally broadens the screen width for the duration of the film until it finally fills out to the 16-by-9 measure, a trick I haven’t seen before even from aspect-fiddlers like Wes Anderson (though nerds on Reddit can correct me on that). It’s not the only way this handily made piece, set in a single location, gains fuller cinematic sheen and soul.
A refugee from Nigeria called Isio (Ronke Adekoluejo) is checked into a women-only detention centre, hoping to claim asylum on the grounds that (a) she’s gay, (b) homosexuality is banned in Nigeria, and (c) back at home her bigoted mother set men upon her to rape her. Naturally enough, this isn’t going to be an easy sell to the asylum umpires (who operate without any sign of lawyers for the claimants).
The centre is housed in a tall Vicwardian building and is somewhere between a prison and the sixth-form wing of a spartan boarding school, complete with high fences, CCTV, graft and bullying in the exercise yard, sausages and mash for dinner, and a particularly well-pitched form of faux-benign English inhumanity among the custodians. “We’re here to help,” says one of the wardens, which turns out to be code for: We’re here to monitor you and dilute your identity. (The majority of British asylum seekers are housed in the community, not locked up like this.)
The disconsolate Isio embarks on a passionate hook-up with her brisker-minded room-mate Farah (Ann Akinjirin), driven out of Nigeria by the jihadists of Boko Haram, and joins a crew also made up of a Ghanaian woman (Diana Yekinni) and an Iraqi with a child stuck in Germany (Aiysha Hart). As the threat of “removal” (that is, deportation) hangs over them, the four plan a jail-break, but things are complicated by a serious roadblock to Farah’s asylum hopes.
The plotting in the final third – in particular, bearing on what the future might hold for them – is on the sketchy side, but maybe that applies to many incarceration movies (unless you go down the fantasy-ending route, à la The Shawshank Redemption). Performances, particularly from Adekoluejo, are punchy, and even actors thanklessly playing the guards hit precise chords of indifference. Gharoro-Akpojotor and her cinematographer Anna Patarakina create a sense of space and grace despite the confines, within a palette of occluded saffron light and bright coloured walls, as though decorated by the African inmates themselves.
In common with some other British films made by those of non-Brit heritage, there’s a mix of social realism and elements of the oneiric, as the title suggests. Disturbing folkloric flashbacks and lines of yearning from poet Carol Ann Duffy are tossed in with dabs of score by Ré Olunuga that might call to mind the gentle piano stylings of South Africa’s Abdullah Ibrahim. A wider screen size by the close goes along with the kind of hope that even lost love can bring, written on the unlikely grin of Isio as myrmidons of the immigration law move in to grab her.
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