Migration and integration are two of the biggest issues facing societies worldwide and can hold the key in preventing crimes and extremism. The panel will explore various challenges such as: What do migrant women sacrifice when they leave their homeland? Is the backlash against migrants justified – are they draining our resources? And how might we empower migrant women specifically in various communities, industries and societies throughout the UK?

Chair

Arti Lukha

Arti Lukha is Senior News Editor at ITV news. Her broadcasting career began at London Tonight on ITV however she was quickly spotted by ITN and was offered a job as deputy news editor and promoted soon after. Arti was awarded Media Professional of the Year for Asian Women of Achievement in 2008.

Speakers

MP Khalid Mahmood

Khalid Mahmood has been Perry Barr in Birmingham’s MP since 2001 and a shadow minister in Labour’s Foreign Affairs team since 2016. In January 2015, Mahmood was nominated for the Politician of the Year award at the British Muslim Awards. More recently he has been named an honorary associate of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe supports freedom of expression of the media, freedom of assembly, equality, and the protection of minorities. It has launched campaigns on issues such as child protection, online hate speech, and the rights of Romani people, Europe’s largest minority.

MEP Julie Ward 

Julie Ward is an active campaigner for equal rights and social justice, most recently organising local events for One Billion Rising, the global movement to raise awareness of violence against women and girls. Prior to being elected as an MEP, Julie had been working with partners in the EU and beyond for more than a decade. For instance, she was recently involved in an international delegation to Belfast to participate in an all-party discussion about the role of the arts in peace-building processes.

Salma Zulfiqar 

Salma Zulfiqar is an International Artist and Activist working on migration. Her current creative projects focus on empowering refugee and migrant women by promoting integration, working towards preventing hate crimes and extremism.  Salma Zulfiqar is British and has also worked all over the world with the United Nations on humanitarian issues in conflict and developing countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Somalia, Chad and Kenya.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a British journalist and author. She is a regular columnist for the i and the London Evening Standard she is a well-known commentator on immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism issues.

Winner of the 2016 Peabody Award, Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas A Nadie) follows a young woman’s remarkable journey from poverty and civil war in rural Colombia to the front page of The New York Times.

Angy Rivera has lived in the U.S. with a dangerous secret: she is undocumented. Now 24, after years of living in the shadows, battling a complex and inequitable immigration system, and facing an uncertain future, Angy joins pro-immigration rallies and proclaims she is “undocumented and proud” – her compelling journey places a human face on the current national immigration debate.

Directed by: Mikaela Shwer
Country: United States
Year: 2015
Runtime: 75′

DOC:Supper is a media project created to bring communities together around meaningful documentary screenings, debates and food. We connect filmmakers , storytellers and field experts with community venues to stimulate social change and greater empathy.

In 2014, 14,792 asylum seekers arrived in Denmark, 2,940 of them were children. At Home in the World follows the day-to-day lives of those children whose families are seeking asylum in the EU.

This remarkably intimate and touching documentary focuses on one Danish Red Cross school for refugees, where classrooms are filled with children from more than twelve countries. The students have had to learn Danish while adjusting to new surroundings and, in some cases, dealing with the traumas of conflict. While some students thrive and find friendship despite their difficult pasts, others act out with feelings of alienation and frustration. Some are denied asylum and sent back to their countries of origin, while others are granted residence and graduate to standard Danish language schools.

With stunning and unobtrusive camera work, director Andreas Koefoed masterfully captures the social and psychological impacts of displacement from the outlook of young people and the educators who are tasked with guiding them – and at times their parents – through daunting new experiences.

Directed by: Andreas Koefoed
Produced by: Sara Stockmann
Production company: Sonntag Pictures
Runtime: 58′
Country: Denmark
athomeintheworldthefilm.com

In this double Sundance winner, Matthew Heineman takes us deep into the world of Mexican drug cartels by embedding himself with two vigilante groups on either side of the US-Mexico border.

In Arizona’s Altar Valley — a narrow, 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley — Tim “Nailer” Foley, an American veteran, heads a small paramilitary group called Arizona Border Recon, whose goal is to halt Mexico’s drug wars from seeping across the border. Meanwhile, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as “El Doctor,” shepherds a citizen uprising against the Knights Templar, the violent drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years.

Heineman repeatedly places himself in harm’s way, filming the chaos as Mireles’ vigilante group begins taking over towns – in the process adapting many of the violent tactics of the drug lords they’re trying to overpower. A visceral journey into North America’s heart of darkness, Cartel Land is a chilling meditation on the breakdown of order and the borderline where life trumps law.

Director: Matthew Heineman
Country: USA/Mexico
Running time: 98′
Distributed by Dogwoof

On Thursday 2 July, Hyeonseo Lee joined an audience at the Frontline Club for a discussion on her experiences as a North Korean defector. Lee, an international campaigner for North Korean human rights and refugee issues, was joined in conversation by author Paul French.

One day after dinner, seventeen-year-old Lee told her parents that she was going to visit a neighbour. “Make sure you’re home before dark,” her mother said at the door. She promised not to be back late and turned to leave her house forever.

The young Lee headed for the neon lights of China that had long beckoned her from across the border. Here she discovered the inevitable loneliness of life as a fugitive, constantly terrified of being uncovered and drifting from her sense of self with every false name she adopted.

“I had to change my name constantly to protect my identity, so I became the girl with seven names,” she said at the start of the talk.

French, an analyst and commentator on Asia, invited Lee to elaborate on points she had mentioned in her memoir The Girl with Seven Names.

He asked about the recurrent theme of superstition, which punctuates much of the book: “Your mother takes you several times to see a fortune teller to try and work out everything from whether or not this boy will be a good marriage or bad marriage, to if you’re going to leave the country what day should you go on.”

French said he was interested in understanding the role of superstition in an atheistic, communist regime.

Lee responded: “People have nothing to rely on so they really, severely rely on the fortune teller,” she laughed. “I even went to see a fortune teller a few months ago.”

As a young girl, a fortune teller predicted that Lee would escape from North Korea, stating, “you will eat the foreign country rice.” Yet even then she only imagined that she would live in a different area of the country – never abroad. She said that the reason North Korea is a “collapsed country” is because Kim Jong-Il believed his own fortune teller too much.

The conversation moved onto the perceived supremacy of the Kim dynasty. Lee admitted that she always believed the leaders to be Gods: “We didn’t consider them as normal human beings” she said. “Until I was fourteen, I thought Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il don’t go to the bathroom and that they killed the enemies when they were five or six years old.”

She expressed amazement at her previous naivety, but defended her beliefs and those still held by her compatriots: “From the moment you are born you are brainwashed severely, even though it’s all a lie, if you hear it every day, every minute, it becomes the truth.”

When Kim Jong-il died, everyone knew that they had to cry or risk dangerous consequences, and “many people really cried with their hearts.” Yet some citizens were sent to prison camps for crying too little, and others for crying too much and appearing insincere.

As well as growing up to a drumbeat of propaganda asserting the Kim family’s godly status, Lee also learned from an early age not to trust anyone. Her mother used to tell her that ‘the walls have ears and the fields have eyes,’ and politics was very rarely spoken about at home.

“Even husband and wife can’t trust each other,” she said.

Her mother was spied on for six years by someone she considered to be her best friend. One day, sick with guilt, the woman spy admitted that she had been reporting to the government on all her actions. Lee said that this kind of betrayal was “everyone’s experience in North Korea.”

Spying and duplicity extended beyond the borders of her country and into China, where new ‘friends’ reported her to the police as a North Korean defector. Lee was forced to lie to her roommate in Shanghai, who years later texted her saying, “I didn’t know you were a defector – I just saw your Ted Talk!”

Lee now lives in Seoul with her mother and brother, whom she helped escape North Korea thirteen years after her own flight. She is married to an American man called Brian.

“My mum was the most brainwashed woman. When I introduced my boyfriend to her she really treated him as an ‘American bastard’. In North Korea, we didn’t learn that Americans were human beings, we just had one word: American-bastards.”

Growing up in North Korea, she was taught that all men from the US had long noses and dressed in military clothes, while the British were always portrayed as gentlemen in tall black hats and capes. Relieved, she said that her mother now accepts the “American-bastard” as a son.

Click here for more information on The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story.

Conflict, economic crisis, and depleting environmental resources are driving increasing numbers of people to attempt the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. At least 1,500 migrants have died so far in 2015 on route to Europe – at least 30 times higher than last year’s equivalent figure.

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, Morgan Knibbe‘s innovative and genre-blurring film, places viewers in the perspective of a person who has begun a dangerous and desperate journey to Europe. From its opening seconds, the film throws us into chaos as a boat carrying families of hopeful migrants plunges into rough waves during the night. While death is presumed for all aboard, one man continues his journey onto European shores as a ghost. Through his narration and observations of immigrants navigating new lives in Europe, we are faced with the reality that even those who survive the voyage arrive to a hostile world.

Skillfully shot and edited by Knibbe, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning includes swooping, dreamlike drone cinematography to capture the everyday lives of immigrants struggling in Greece and Italy. By employing unconventional documentary methods, Knibbe creates a humanistic and conscious-raising portrait of the individual lives at stake in the migration crisis.

Directed by Morgan Knibbe
Produced by BALDR Film
Duration: 71′
Year: 2014

Young Muslims are travelling from Europe to fight in countries such as Syria and Somalia, lured by groups like Al-Shabaab and the Islamic State (IS). Warriors From the North follows a cohort of young Al-Shabaab sympathisers in Denmark and Sweden.

The film focuses on a Danish-Somalian boy who gradually gained contact with the group and joined them in Somalia. With his back turned to the camera as he looks out over a nondescript housing development in Copenhagen, his friend “The Shadow” describes how the young man fell victim to recruiters and left his family behind to fight for Al-Shabaab.

In-depth discussions with former members of the Danish Al-Shabaab group break stereotypes about the profile of young men and women who join – many had supportive families, attended school and led seemingly normal lives until members of the community introduced them to a previously unknown network of Al-Shabaab devotees, and along with it a new sense of belonging.

Directors Nasib Farah and Søren Steen Jespersen approach the subject from multiple perspectives, speaking with current Al-Shabaab members, young men who have left the group and the family of one young man who left his life behind to join Al-Shabaab. A number of other very young fighters from other countries including The Netherlands, their identities concealed, explain why they left home and are prepared to die.

Directed by Søren Steen Jespersen
Duration: 59′
Year: 2014

On Friday 27 March, the Frontline Club partnered with the London School of Economics to host a series of films for the 7th annual LSE Literary Festival. The external screening, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was packed out with members of the public for a night of short films exploring the foundations of identity and place. The five films took the audience on a journey to far flung corners of the earth, from rural Turkey to the Arctic Circle. While striking in their different visual styles, each shared a common thread by providing intimate snapshots of the lives of displaced individuals, traumatised and trapped in alien landscapes.

“You have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go,” whispers Habib Aydin as he captures a wild bird in a crude wooden cage on the outskirts of his village in south-east Turkey. This is one of the most symbolic scenes in Reber Dosky’s The Call, which follows the story of Habib and his determination to call his only son Ramazan back to settle in the village they fled in 1989. While Habib returned 7 years ago to remarry, his first family remained in Istanbul. “What does this village have to offer?” Ramazan asks during a short visit to see his father. Habib replies: “animals, rocks… what does it not have?” Touched with humour and a soundtrack of birdsong and bleating goats, Dosky presents a story about loss of tradition across a generational divide, where the disconnect between love of family and land is felt keenly.

Xenos, a short by Mahdi Fleifel, follows a group of impoverished Lebanese youths trapped in Greece which is in the grip of economic disaster. Their hopeless existence unfolds in a telephone conversation, played over shots of streets lined with drug addicts cowering in shuttered shop porches. The camera is grainy and uncomfortably intrusive, reflecting the desperate measures they take for money to buy hard drugs. “I’ve tried to mingle with the Greeks,” one youth says, “but when you do, they assume you are gay. They say ‘you want sex?’” Speaking of how they sell their bodies to strangers in a nearby park, another reflects. “This country ruins your soul.”

Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla offers a different perspective of the conventional refugee narrative in Two at the Border, by focusing on the plight of two smugglers stationed at the Turkish city of Edirne near Greece. Ali, from Syria, and Naser, from Palestine, form a strong bond through their shared financial hardship and longing for home. “I thought about returning to Palestine,” Naser admits in the confines of his apartment. “My parents are seriously ill. They cry on the phone for me to come home. I haven’t been able to send a single lira back.” Stuck in their own limbo, their lives consist of traversing the distance between their apartment and the heavily patrolled borders.

In October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Morgan Knibbe’s Shipwreck is a testament to the horrors faced by those who resort to crossing into Europe by sea. The camera sways and lurches as hundreds of coffins are loaded onto a military ship at the harbour. Between the hysteria and silence of loss, one survivor, Abraham, whispers his story as he walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks.

In the last film of the evening, Adrift, Frederik Jan Depickere follows the story of Simu, a Ugandan who fled political persecution. He now works as a construction site cleaner 150km above the Arctic Circle. With all his family dead or missing, Simu stares out over the ghostly tundra landscape. “I used to dream of being a pop singer,” he says. “But according to my situation now, I think that dream is dead.” The camera pans over a field of snow peppered with bare black trees. “I don’t belong here. But at home they would just make me disappear.”

For more information on the LSE Literary Festival 2015, click here.

Nowhere To Call Home tells the powerful story of Zanta, a Tibetan woman who moves to Beijing against the wishes of her in-laws so that her young son can receive an education.

 
Widowed at 28, Tibetan farmer Zanta defies her tyrannical father-in-law and refuses to marry the family’s only surviving son following her husband’s death. When Zanta’s in-laws won’t let her seven-year-old child go to school, she flees her village and heads to Beijing where she becomes a street vendor. Destitute and embattled by discrimination, Zanta inveigles a foreign customer into helping pay her boy’s school fees. On a New Year’s trip back to her village, Zanta’s in-laws take her son hostage, drawing the unwitting American into the violent family feud. The two women forge a partnership in an attempt to outmanoeuvre the in-laws, who, according to tradition, get the final say on their grandson’s future.

In an article titled “Inspiring Dialogue, Not Dissent, in China,” the New York Times wrote that “The film breaks down the sometimes romantic Shangri-La view that Westerners have of Tibet… and offers a shocking portrait of the outright racism… Tibetans face in Chinese parts of the country.”

Directed by Jocelyn Ford
Duration: 76′
Year: 2014

Every year thousands of Africans leave their families behind in search of a better life in Europe. Ditte Haarløv Johnsen‘s intimate portrayal of everyday life after emigration explores the lives of three very different African immigrants, from three different places, who have embarked on a perilous journey to reach a common destination: Europe.

With rawness and dignity, Days of Hope presents personal experiences of migration and the obstacles faced by African immigrants in Europe.

Directed by Ditte Haarløv Johnsen
Duration: 75′
Year: 2013