Good Evening to the People Living in the Camp

For years, the news has been dominated by refugees, but who really knows them? For this unorthodox document, artist and filmmaker Joost Conijn went on a search. In Greece, he managed to worm his way through a hole in the fence into a camp guarded by soldiers at a deserted airfield. In France, outside the Calais ‘jungle’, he waited in a dark field with his newfound acquaintances for trucks going to England.

Conijn follows the inhabitants of refugee camps – with no agenda, main characters or preconceived plan. He is not so interested in their desperate plight, but in their activities. It turns out that life goes on indomitably, in the shadow of ‘current affairs’. A family play football, a child stokes a fire and those who can visit an improvised bathhouse. A camp is razed, to spring up again elsewhere. People loom up out of the dark, before disappearing into it again.

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