Europe’s New Faces review – a punishing, immersive look at the migrant voyage
Sam Abbas, an Egyptian-American filmmaker, spent four years crafting an experimental documentary that follows African and South Asian migrants as they navigate the perilous path through Libya and across the Mediterranean to a Parisian squat. Yet describing the film as a straightforward journey would be misleading: it unfolds in two sections that feel almost out of sequence if you expect a traditional, person-by-person narrative. The first half centers on life inside the squat, where residents support one another while facing eviction threats and the labyrinth of asylum procedures. The second half shifts to the sea crossing, capturing the precarious passage on ships operated by aid groups like Doctors Without Borders.
This may sound like many contemporary takes on migration, reminiscent of Fire at Sea or Io Capitano in tone and subject. But Abbas’s work defies conventional storytelling. It is aggressively non-narrative, built from long, unmoving shots and still images that linger far longer than usual, urging viewers to sit with what they witness. The film presents a collage of raw, often opaque imagery: bodies and faces, a glimpse of a fuse box, a dramatic emergency birth depicted in stark, unflinching terms, a phone screen filled with messages, waves and water, exhausted migrants stacked on a deck. The editing offers little in the way of explicit context, leaving much to interpretation and sometimes to the viewer’s imagination, under murky, low lighting.
A tense, jagged score by Bertrand Bonello—carefully unsentimental and persistent—hums in the background, neither guiding nor fully receding from the visuals, which feel almost accidental in their randomness. The film’s lack of a clear narrative arc, structure, or singular guiding perspective can make it difficult to form an immediate emotional connection with the migrants on screen. The 159-minute running time stretches, at times, like an endurance test rather than a cinematic voyage. The single, luminous exception arrives in a minute-long moment from the first section: a woman dances to Oumou Sangaré’s vibrant track Seya, offering a rare instant of brightness amid the hardship.
But here’s where it gets controversial: Abbas’s choice to withhold traditional storytelling invites a powerful debate about how best to depict migration on film. Does the absence of a plan, a through-line, or a conventional arc intensify the reality of the migrants’ experience, or does it risk alienating audiences and diminishing empathy? And this is the part most people miss: the film asks you to inhabit the uncertainty and ambiguity of the journey, rather than be fed a neatly resolved tale. Some viewers may praise its unflinching realism and experimental courage; others may feel disconnected, craving clearer context and character-driven threads.
What do you think: should documentary filmmakers prioritize immersive, non-narrative methods to convey complexity, or should they maintain clearer storytelling to sustain engagement and empathy? Would you be drawn into this kind of cinema, or does it risk overshadowing the human stories at its core?
