SEEKERS
Told through the eyes of a frustrated 22-year-old refugee, Bella Kwizera, whose refugee documents prevent her from going to university or take up any formal employment, SEEKERS is a story of the strength to navigate and rise above adversity. The film will highlight issues against which African refugees struggle in their search for opportunities to lead dignified lives that add value to their host communities and to humanity in general. Hence, the documentary will privilege the refugees’ agency to forge such opportunities in spite of the adversities linked to their refugee condition.
SEEKERS will employ a combination of personal life stories, re-enactment, and commentary by various experts (historians, social scientists, social activists, and philosophers). It will also include views from South African community members and representatives of various African refugee populations, as well as of international organisations.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
According to a 2021 report by the UNHCR, there are 89.3 million forcibly displaced people in the world; 30 million of them live in Africa. From academia and the media to the humanitarian discourses, three recurrent representations frame discussions on refugees.
The first frame demonizes refugees as a national threat to the culture, security and welfare of the host country
The second frames refugees as passive victims of circumstances, which disempowers them
The third, objectifies them as a dehumanized, faceless out-group.
Within these frames, the refugees’ personal accounts of their lived experiences have either been relegated into the background or ignored, altogether. Also, these frames remain silent on how a racialized system of subjectivities complicate the refugees’ own efforts to self-determine, and more so for the African refugee! This is the central focus of SEEKERS.
The film will argue that the plight of African refugees is, to a great extent, supported by public narratives grounded in ignorance of malignant aspects of a racialized black subjectivity manufactured to serve the interest of reproducing inequality and, by extension, the continued subjugation of Blacks.
Accordingly, the film intends to awaken viewers to the reality that persistence of such ignorance remains a covert but very powerful obstacle to black self-empowerment, without which anti-black racism will prevail.
Impact
In a culture permeated with fear of sharing the world with those we do not understand (Braidotti 2019), SEEKERS aims to open up possibilities for affirmative representations – representations that encourage genuine interest in and reverence of human experiences other than one’s own. In particular, the film aims to shift representations of refugees as useless and dehumanized beings, with no value to add to humanity. But its ultimate impact will be to mobilize human and material resources to establish a University Student Fund for African Refugees.
