Ghost ex machina exposes Europe's wretched migrants

By Harry van Versendaal

Morgan Knibbe did not set out to make an objective documentary about one of the biggest problems facing Europe today: the plight of migrants and refugees on the continent.

"My ambition was to try to understand how these people feel. I wanted to submerge myself in their world and to share this experience with other people. I felt that I was able to achieve this by creating a highly subjective audiovisual form," the 26-year-old filmmaker from the Netherlands says about his first feature film, "Those Who Feel the Fire Burning," which will screen at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.

"Filmmaking is the art of manipulation... Pulling people out of their comfort zone makes them look at existing values in a different way."

The opening of the film, which made waves at Amsterdam's prestigious IDFA film festival, where it debuted, is faithful to this credo. A boat carrying immigrant families is seen adrift on rough seas in the black of night. A father tries to calm his anxious daughter as the vessel is tossed about by the waves. A man falls into the water and starts to go down. And then, black.

This re-enactment of a Lampedusa-style boat tragedy, the only staged part of the film, is enough to raise eyebrows among purist documentary filmmakers. However, it is also instrumental in allowing Knibbe to introduce his ghost ex machina, as it were. Stuck in purgatory, a ghost steers viewers through the largely invisible lives of undocumented migrants.

"We wanted to create the perspective of a ghost flying through a dark place between heaven and hell. A metaphor," he says of his cinematic device which is reminiscent of Wim Wenders's fiction classic "Wings of Desire."

It's a highly immersive...