TBI Factual Hot Picks: Migrants – The Failures Of Fortress Europe

Producer: Capa | Distributor: Newen Connect | Broadcaster: Arte (France)

This documentary explores the pressures that the European Union (EU) is facing from large-scale migration and the vast sums of money it is paying in an attempt to tackle the issue.

“To keep migrants away from European shores and limit applications for asylum, the EU has chosen, since 2015, to resort to a new strategy: the externalisation of migration policy,” says producer Anthony Orilange. “This involves entrusting third-party countries, outside of Europe, with the task of preventing waves of refugees from arriving on the continent.

Turkey, Niger, and soon Senegal, Mauritania and even Rwanda, are, or will be, responsible for retaining asylum candidates in exchange for financial or diplomatic advantages.”
Combining field investigation, geopolitical reflection and historical context, this film questions the moral, human and financial cost of the EU resettlement program.

“Our film reveals the mechanisms of this strategy, and the dangers it entails. For migrants, forced to take even more dangerous routes. For transit countries, responsible for welcoming growing populations despite strong local tensions. And for the EU, which, by entrusting the keys to the fortress to others, exposes itself to migratory blackmail from its partners and its enemies alike. It all adds up to major geopolitical risk-taking,” explains Orilange.

The producer says that the film is the first documentary to deconstruct and analyse in detail “this strategy of externalisation of European migration policy – and its consequences.”

He adds: “It is not covering the issues from a moral point of view, as there are already many remarkable films evoking the dramatic fate of people attempting a passage across the Mediterranean. Our film is purely factual, even clinical: does this strategy work? What are its financial, human and geopolitical costs?”