Film review: Wandering sheds light on Rohingya people living in the world's largest refugee camp
Documentary at the Rendez-Vous French Film Festival shows what life is like for more than 600,000 persecuted Muslims from Myanmar
The Kutupalong Refugee Camp. Photo by Renaud Philippe
Wandering: A Rohingya Story (Errance Sans Retour) screens at the Rendez-Vous French Film Festival February 12 to 14.
THE KUTUPALONG REFUGEE camp in Bangladesh is just 13 square kilometres, but it’s the largest such settlement in the world. More than 600,000 persecuted Rohingya Muslims live in cramped temporary shelters there, haunted and hungry. Their days are long.
Wandering: a Rohingya Story (Errance sans retour) is a painful, poetic look at daily life in this desperate place.
The Rohingya are an ethnic minority who have lived for generations in Myanmar (formerly Burma, which is predominantly Buddhist), but whom the Myanmar government refuses to recognize as citizens.
August 2017 marked the start of the largest stream of refugees out of Myanmar ever, after the country’s military responded to an attack by a Rohingya armed group on security posts. Atrocious violence escalated quickly, with the army burning entire villages to the ground and raping, torturing, and killing civilians. Within months, Kutupalong swelled.
Those who survived the 12-day journey through mountains, forests, and rivers to Kutupalong arrived traumatized, only to spend their days in a state of stateless limbo. They have no passports or citizenship and nowhere to go. They are living the brutal reality of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, one that documentary photographer Renaud Philippe began covering in 2018. Moved by the his dedication and motivated to help raise awareness of the Rohingya plight, Quebec-based filmmakers Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins of MO Films joined forces with Philippe and travelled to southeastern Bangladesh.
Photo by Renaud Philippe
Wandering is narrated by Mohammed Shofi, a Rohingya born in the Myanmar village of Buthidong who lived at Kutupalong for 18 years before being accepted as a refugee in Canada and settling in Québec City. As its narrative thread, the film features the poems of Kala Miya (Kalam), a Rohingya from the village of Long Doon Foki Daung Nga Kuu Ya who fled Myanmar in 2012 for India. He has lived in the Kutupalong camp since 2018, working as an English teacher and also as a translator and fixer for journalists and non-governmental organizations. He was a key collaborator for the film, directing interviews on-site.
Kalam’s gentle poetry evokes his terror and his simple wish for freedom. We see men and women walking single file through waist-high water, babies on their shoulders, away from their homeland. Inside the camp, boys giggle as they play soccer barefoot in muddy puddles; a teen girl, whose mom brushes her long hair, shares memories of the abundant fruit trees near their former house and of her father being murdered by the military; women crouch together and speak of the children who have disappeared. (Human trafficking is a common threat.) When the monsoon rains arrive, the narrow paths between families’ ramshackle shelters become flowing streams.
Wandering is a sobering work that not only illustrates life at its very hardest but that is crucial in waking the world up to this largely overlooked crisis. If people like Kalam can’t sleep at night, how can we?
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