Highway, Road, Embankment, Bus: About Laura Waddington’s Film Border

By Mari Laanemets

Translated from the Estonian

Border is a film about Afghan and Iraqi refugees from the Sangatte Red Cross camp on the coast of northern France. Equipped with an ordinary mini-DV camera, Laura Waddington accompanied the refugees through the fields and along the highways surrounding the camp, where, unable to reach England legally, they tried to enter the Channel Tunnel by hiding inside lorries or leaping onto passing freight trains. The camp, installed in a former corrugated-metal warehouse, six kilometres from the port of Calais and the entrance to the Channel Tunnel is both a result and mechanism of the European Union’s new asylum policy, and the restructuring of Europe’s borders. This policy allows for the internment of refugees in so-called reception centres where the “sorting of refugees for economic purposes” takes place. In this way, the right to asylum, defined in the 1951 Geneva Convention, is transformed into a policy of pure “supply” and “demand” and the concept of the refugee is delegated—an asylum seeker becomes an illegal immigrant. While the Geneva Convention promised shelter to all those harassed and persecuted due to their race or ethnicity, the European Union’s new refugee policy is based on its radical opposite, depriving certain people of the freedom of movement enshrined in by the Declaration of Human Rights precisely because of their race. Origin becomes a legitimate basis for deciding people’s fate.

The author explains that she wanted to show what was being suppressed and shut out of people’s consciousness, to depict what is happening only an hour and a half from Paris, but which nobody knows about and which therefore seems not to exist. She is referring to the media representation of Sangatte (and the topic of refugees in general): static shots of poor, threatening, violent masses “infiltrating” Europe’s borders, endlessly repeated in the mainstream news, framed by a discourse of nationalist self-defence. Yet this vision reveals more about what refugees embody for Europe—the existential fear of a globalising world, of (forced) mobility and of the social insecurity it produces. At the same time, such news reports rarely consider migration as a specific global reality, or as a lived experience of mobility.

But even those who who were there find it impossible to talk about their experience. “You cannot tell them you were in Sangatte,” the author says to one Sangatte refugee who has sent her a letter from England. Border does not claim to represent the refugees. The film does not make any patronising political demands. It makes no proposals concerning the right course of action or how things should be improved. The film is the director’s personal portrait of what she saw and she is reconciled to the impossibility of fully understanding, interpreting or judging it. In a letter to Nicole Brenez, Waddington writes that filmmaking provides an opportunity to distance oneself from official, established versions of the world, and to ask, in the simplest possible way, who we are and how we are living?

The director’s voice-over recounts hours of waiting and running through the grass, of cutting holes in wire fences, of faces blinded and swollen by police tear gas. She shares her admiration for the strength and dignity of the refugees in the face of the inhumane treatment that they encounter throughout Europe. She conveys the disappointment of those who manage to reach the other side, to discover that the “promised land” is not what they thought it would be

Although documentary in form, the film’s visual language is a departure from the “aesthetics of reality” characteristic of reportage and factual cinema. Waddington avoids the media’s tourist-like and sensationalist voyeurism, as well as the all-knowing gaze of politically engaged documentaries that attempt to speak on behalf of others. Only once in Border, during a confrontation with the police do the refugees’ faces come into full focus, she resists the proliferation of personified images. The refugees who Waddington describes with great sincerity and intimacy remain anonymous to the viewer, silhouettes on the horizon. The disquieting, impressionistic and inherently beautiful images render this world almost unreal

Border is characterised by long, unbroken takes. The blurred and grainy images have an almost ornamental quality. The fragile aesthetics of the film are a result of the poor technical conditions: a hand-held camera, movement, and darkness— the only light comes from the police searchlights as they hunt for the refugees, a few distant street lamps and occasional headlights of passing cars. The long focal lengths and the camera’s shutter open to its widest degree create a strange discontinuity of movement.

Waddington favours video as an intensely personal medium. The video camera leaves room to discover the world and a story. The manner of filming is not established in advance but gradually becomes clear in the course of making the film, through chance. Even technical errors that occur in the process of filming take on meaning, mirroring inner perception: the aforementioned fragmentation, which arose mechanically, seems to reflect the ghostly presence of refugees in our consciousness (“they are and they are not”).

The film ultimately takes form in post-production, through the organising and structuring of the recorded material. The emphasis is not on illustration or finding the “true” image of the refugees but on reflecting a condition. Waddington does not paint yet another portrait of refugees, she instead constructs a film out of their experience—that of being on the road, of waiting and repetition. The rhythm of the film—a series of very long shots, that follow a few actions or motifs to the point of near exhaustion—mimics this seeming circular passage of time; the experience of constant repetition, whereby the refugees set out every night, only to be caught by the police and brought back to the camp, to set out again after a few minutes later.

A recurring image in Border is of people walking along a road. We see them in groups or following on from each other, at short intervals. Waddington turns migration itself into the theme, presenting us with a specific experience of mobility that challenges the aesthetic fascination with nomadism as a contemporary way of life. The perspective of a migrant, pushed from country to country, differs from that of privileged travellers such as tourists, business people, and why not, cultural workers too. Before reaching Sangatte, the refugees have been on the road for months, some even for years, passing through several countries in the Middle East and Europe. Yet unlike privileged travel, which is defined by the pleasure of experiencing foreign places and crossing borders, and where movement means freedom and opportunity, this being on the road is an “imprisonment”. The music of Simon Fisher Turner surrounds them like a vacuum.

Border thus presents a unique experience of time and space. In fact, the film is a walk through space (it is edited so that the movement in each new shot begins where the previous one ends). It with another interesting aspect of the film, the landscape, that I would like to conclude. Waddington’s camera does not focus on the camp, but on the fields and roads surrounding it. Only rarely do recognisable “attributes” of the camp, such as fences, barbed and wire, appear in the frame The film is dominated by night-time landscapes, shots of embankments covered in tall grass and bushes, where the figures of refugees momentarily appear, only to blend back into the surrounding nature. Highways cut through open fields and vanish into the horizon. From time to time, a car passes the late night travellers. This is not a picturesque touristic landscape, but an everyday one, and this is underscored by the muted colour palette and low shooting angle. Solely the nocturnal light and the reeds swaying in the wind create a mystical atmosphere, mixed with danger, hinting at the drama contained in the ostensibly prosaic scenes.

Martin Warnke has shown that every landscape is in itself a representation– its appearance the result of political decisions, and therefore to be read and situated politically. This unassuming, and seemingly vacant landscape carries within it the imprint of power, traces of various economic, political, and other considerations, that reflect social and societal relationships. Just as urban planning, commerce and tourism shape landscapes, so too does migration. The area around Sangatte, with its port of Calais, the petrol stations, car parks, and heavily secured Eurotunnel terminal, represents the socio-spatial geography of concrete control and, in turn, the movement that seeks to evade it. The landscape imagery of the film points to the informal relationships that structure the space around the Sangatte refugee camp, revealing the ambivalence, subordination, and resistance that are inscribed in the terrain. On the one hand, this landscape of control and prohibition dictates the movement that the refugees try, in turn, to subvert. The film’s frames trace the boundaries that define this landscape. For example, where the beam of light from a passing train diagonally bisects the frame, impassable and impenetrable to the refugees, hiding in the grass below the embankment. At the same time, at night, the walking paths and roads around Sangatte become routes of everyday migration. In the darkness of night, the landscape becomes an ally to the refugees, shielding them from police patrols. The ghostly yet self-aware presence of these “imprisoned” figures, and the spontaneity of their movement through the terrain, temporarily disrupt the habitual, established order of the regime.

The landscape offers a new way of seeing, a different perspective, and an opportunity to engage with migration—a means to describe the condition of refugees both within the specific space of Sangatte and in a broader, metaphorical sense.

Waddington filmed in Sangatte from the spring of 2002 until the camp’s closure in December of the same year. In retrospect, it seems like a dream even to the director. Border remains as a trace of those who “pass through our lives only to disappear without a trace”, holding on, not for the sake of “the politics of truth” but for the sake of humanity, to that which is so easily forgotten. As the bright lights of an approaching car in the film’s final shot film dissolves the image of a group of refugees receding down the road, it is as if they were being erased from our consciousness.

References:

Laura Waddington: Letter to Nicole Brenez, 2006
Grenzgeografie Sangatte, An Architektur 3/2002
Martin Warnke: Politische Landschaft, 1992

Reproduced with kind permission of Mari Laanemets. First published in Estonian and English in the exhibition catalogue, the English translation was revised in 2025 in consultation with the author.

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