“The real does not speak by itself”

In this interview, Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter discuss the making of their film Elsewhere, Everywhere (2020 Ailleurs, partout in its original French version) 1 which arose from their encounter with the young Iranian Shahin Parsa, when he was living in a refugee camp in Greece.A few months after their first encounter, the filmmakers found a metamorphosed Shahin in the United Kingdom where he had applied for asylum.A disparate collection of documents make up the film: surveillance footage, a reading of an interview with the British immigration office, phone conversations between Shahin and his mother in Iran, etc. Through the film and its mediations, the two directors interrogate media representations and framings of the exiled, as well as the complexity of an individual who is under no obligation to resemble any preconceived image that one may have of him.