Ilyas and Ahmet are two close friends. Emir, Syrian refugee, completes the gang. Ilyas wants to make the tryouts for a local football team and saves money to buy new cleats. Emir shares his ideal. After seeing his father pays the debts of Emir’s family at the grocery store, Ilyas gives his new cleats as a gift to Emir in order to join to the tryouts. However, his own cleats tear up just after. The shoemaker gives him a better pair of cleats temporarily. The tryouts morning one of Ilyas’ cleats drops to the river. When Ilyas and Ahmet try to take it out, Emir surprises them with what he’s done.

Cleats

On the morning of football tryouts one of Ilyas’ cleats falls in the river. When Ilyas and Ahmet try to take it out, Emir, a refugee, surprises them both.

The story of Mabel, an asylum seeker detained by ICE. Hoping for release and fearing deportation, Mabel provides a harrowing view of the migrant detention system.

Wednesday at Elizabeth

The story of Mabel, an asylum seeker detained by ICE. Hoping for release and fearing deportation, Mabel provides a harrowing view of the migrant detention system.

Fata and Yankuba are two young Gambian migrants with distinct and ambitious dreams, who fled dictatorship and poverty, and landed in Naples only to discover a new kind of violence: a pernicious climate of racism and a corrupt immigration system. Their only solace escape from the psychological torture of years spent waiting for documents in squalid camps is a small underground club in the heart of the city. As divisive anti-immigration rhetoric ricochets through the media, migrant-run Teranga nightclub manifests as a rare safe space for migrants to meet young Italians whilst dancing and singing away the collective trauma of their journeys to Europe and the discrimination they face in Italy.

Teranga – Life in the Waiting Room

Haunted by the difficulties of their pasts and dreaming of a future with indefinite leave to remain, two young Gambian asylum seekers escape the boredom and fear of life as a migrant in Matteo Salvini’s Italy by dancing away their trauma in Teranga, an Afrobeats migrant-run nightclub in Naples.

“It’s too hard to live in Lebanon. Everywhere is warmth and heat. Syria is my homeland, where my beloved resides.” So goes the improvised song of Ammar, describing his discontent exiled from Syria, living in a Lebanese refugee camp, near Anjar in the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border. Like Ammar, millions are waiting for the end of the brutal war, living in tents in makeshift camps. Metropolitan Beirut, is just about two hours away by car. Before the Lebanese Civil War, Beirut was considered a jewel of a city, called “the Paris of the East,” or “Switzerland of the Orient.” Captured on camera are Syrian refugees and Lebanese, singing and talking about their experiences, their daily lives, their desires and their dreams, brought together in the same country—Lebanon. Full of devotion, they sing about love, country and religion. By interweaving poetry, interviews, and songs in such a manner, we have been able to show the hardships people face in these places shaken by years-long crises, yet also the strength and dignity they have retained in spite of their circumstances.

The Song of the Valley

Millions of Syrian refugees are waiting for the end of the brutal war, living in tents in the Bekaa-Valley. Full of devotion, they sing about their daily lives, their desires, love, country and religion.

United States of America

BLOCK 13: Immigrant Stories I

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