Border is the second film in our series of screenings associated with our current exhibition, Crossings. Like the works in the exhibition, these films have been selected for their relevance as we grapple with the effects of global lockdowns and the heightened anxieties generated by events of 2020, films that register the polarities of inside and outside, illness and health, public and private.

In the days, if you wandered along the motorways and the wastelands, you could see the refugees everywhere: waiting on the roadside or headed to the port and the freight trains. They travelled in twos or threes or sometimes in groups of twenty or thirty. 

At night, I’d walk along the roads with them. It took two or three hours to reach the spots on the channel tunnel fence, where they’d start to cut the wire. Then came the arrests and the police bus back to the camp. A few hours later, they’d re-emerge and the perverse game of cat and mouse would start again.
― Laura Waddington

In 2002, filmmaker Laura Waddington spent several months in the fields around Sangatte Red Cross camp in northern France with Afghan and Iraqi refugees, who were trying to cross the channel tunnel to England. Filmed with a small video camera and the illumination of only distant car headlights, far off street lamps and police torches, Border is a personal account of the refugees’ plight and the police violence that followed the camp’s closure.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with writer, publisher and activist Murdoch Stephens, the driving force behind ‘Doing our Bit’, the campaign to double New Zealand’s refugee quota. He has published dozens of opinion editorials, academic articles and book chapters on New Zealand’s refugee quota and the country’s response to the refugee crisis. Stephens has a PhD on critical theory and climate change from Massey University. His most recent novel, Rat King Landlord, was published by Lawrence & Gibson in 2020.