‘Notes On Displacement’: IDFA Review

Dir: Khaled Jarrar. Palestine/Germany/Qatar. 2022. 75mins

While ostensibly one more addition to the crowded sub-genre of refugee/migrant-themed documentaries about Middle Easterners making their hazardous way to safety in Europe, Khaled Jarrar’s Notes on Displacement stands out for its raw, propulsive immediacy. In contrast to its academically dry title, this is an urgently impassioned plea for understanding and empathy that should find further exposure following its bow in the Envision competition at Amsterdam’s IDFA.

 Skilfully crafted, with a commendably thorough attention to the whys and hows of migrant/refugee issues

This is only the second directorial outing for noted multi-media visual artist Jarrar, a full decade after Infiltrators (2012) which relied on rough-edged hand-held camerawork to convey the plight of his fellow Palestinians hemmed in by Israel’s so-called security wall. Jarrar adopts a similar stylistic approach here, combining lo-fi imagery with a carefully modulated soundscape including a small handful of musical tracks: two by Chinese-American Du Yun and one by Palestinian-American Akram Abdulfattah.

Jarrar is again right in amongst his protagonists as they essay what has, since the Syrian-refugee emergency of 2015 – the year in which Notes On Displacement was filmed – become a familiar itinerary: a truly perilous and traumatic crossing of the Mediterranean to Greece, then up through the Balkans and Hungary (“no country is worse that this!”) to the “promised land” of Germany — although some of those filmed continue northwards towards what was then a similarly-welcoming Sweden.

While always identifying himself to the relevant authorities as a filmmaker in possession of correct paperwork, Jarrar shares with his main subjects — among them the stoic, 78-year-old Nadira, a wheelchair-user who has been a refugee of some kind for most of her long life — the torrid travails of the stateless, peripatetic indigent. Several sequences are horrific in their chaotic intensity, such as an nocturnal dockside scramble near the start that recalls a famous similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds but is even more nerve-jangling because of its unvarnished veracity. 

Making their way through Macedonia and Serbia, the travellers endure the vicissitudes of the weather, terrain and human nature, with Jarrar unobtrusively embedded amongst them in the name of reportage. The process of his filming attracts regular wry comment from the refugees, these asides entertainingly retained in the final cut by veteran editor Gladys Joujou (whose impressively eclectic credits include Oliver Stone’s Alexander).

The emphasis is on the most obviously sympathetic of the voyagers — charming oldsters and winsome children  — in a project which is explicit in its humanistic, consciousness-raising stance. The end credits feature a large QR code held on the screen for around half a minute, by which concerned viewers can “support our protagonists” with financial aid.

Agit-prop it may be but, despite an occassional tendency to lay on the score for emotional effect, Notes On Displacement is skilfully crafted, with a commendably thorough attention to the whys and hows of migrant/refugee issues explored via on-the-hoof interviews that economically convey the specific details of each individual’s unique tale. Elegantly foxing authoritarian officials who deny his right to film by keeping the sound running while his lens is covered with a red cloth, Jarrar is not afraid to verbally challenge those who he feels are overstepping the legal mark; no passive fly-on-the-wall, he.