Synopsis
An essay in five parts, Evaporating Borders offers a series of vignettes, poetically guided by the filmmaker’s curious eye and personal reflections. Through the people she encounters along the way, the film dissects the experience of asylum seekers in Cyprus, one of the easiest ports of entry into Fortress Europe. Poetically photographed and rendered, the film passionately weaves the themes of migration, tolerance, identity and belonging.
A word from Tënk
With her magnificent documentary essay Evaporating Borders, Serbian filmmaker Iva Radivojevic explores the infinitely complicated issue of borders, migration crises, and the identities that they build and simultaneously betray. Radivojevic’s deftly employed personal reflections are interwoven with sober and meaningful shots of her adoptive homeland of Cyprus to sketch a succinct historical portrait of this island, which has been inhabited by multiple communities for decades, and thus contextualize Greece’s insidious slide towards fascism, fed by the falsehood that refugees have greater privilege than residents and are to blame for everything wrong. They became the enemy, nameless and faceless. With Evaporating Borders, Radivojevic creeps in and observes how rhetoric that wishes to justify the unjustifiable is constructed, while in the sea, boats capsize with men, women and children aboard. Once on the island, hope evaporates for refugees, and life is reduced to the confines of the camp, waiting for an authorization that may never come. Cyprus: one of the worst places for migrants to live, according to one support worker. It’s a reality that shares cruel echoes with our current context.
RIDM Programming Collective
