Héros sans visage
Belgium | 2012 | 60 min
World premiere
Languages : English, French
Subtitles : English, French
Migrants in Brussels go on hunger strike to obtain papers, with the result that one man dies. In a Tunisian camp on the border with Libya, refugees describe the horrors of their journey up from the Sahara. A man in Liège tells how he crossed the Mediterranean on an inflated rubber tyre. In three episodes, Mary Jimenez films a “war for survival” that is inevitable and endless.
Héros sans visage investigates the “war” waged by migrants in order to survive. During a hunger strike by some illegal immigrants in Brussels, Mary Jimenez films and gathers information about their struggle, which is eventually victorious, except that one of the strikers sacrifices the only thing he has left to lose: his life. In search of this faceless man, the filmmaker subsequently travels to Tunisia, to the Choucha camp, which receives refugees from the civil war in Libya. They tell of the horrors of their desert crossing: “in place of the missing one, all the others”, the multitude, shadows on the sand, bearers of a polyphonic tale of “life stripped bare”, the blind spot of our supposedly “shared” world. This plural narrative is followed by the story of a migrant who made it to the other side but was refused asylum. In a Belgian Red Cross centre, this faceless, nameless immigrant – ghostly minstrel of all the wretched-of-the earth who haunt our well-fed consciences – relives “his” crossing of the Mediterranean on a rubber inner tube.
Emmanuel Chicon
Translation BMP Translations