Refugee (2016)

This short documentary (24 minutes) made by the Annenberg Space for Photography is a powerful if impressionistic introduction to our global refugee crisis of 65 million people who have been forced to leave their homes. The sparse narration by Cate Blanchett follows five photojournalists who document the plight of these people. The British Tom Stoddart is on the beach in Lesbos, Greece, when the rubber rafts wash ashore and the refugees trade their life jackets for a foil "blanket." In separate segments, he then follows their trek to the pouring rain and sea of mud in the desolate no man's land between Croatia and Slovenia, and then to their destination in Berlin. The Mexican Graciela Iturbide works in a slum in Colombia among people internally displaced by gang violence and drug wars. The Senegalese fashion photographer Omar Diop took his first trip ever to a refugee camp in Cameroon, where people fleeing violence in the Central African Republic had fled. The American Pulitzer Prize winner Lynsey Addario travels to Myanmar and documents the displaced Rohingya Muslims. And finally, the German-born Martin Schoeller welcomes recently resettled refugees to his studio in New York, where he takes facial Polaroid portraits.  "Unfortunately," says Iturbide, "photography can't save the world. We have to save it. Photography can't do that." For two other films on this subject, see my reviews of Human Flow (2018) by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and Fire at Sea (2016). I watched this film on Netflix Streaming.