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Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating

Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating

Basir Mahmood | Netherlands, Pakistan, Italy | 2024 | 25' |

| IFFR 2025

Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape Are Often Migrating by Basir Mahmood offers a meditation on migration’s complexities through the prism of cinematic re-enactment.

Drawing inspiration from videos recorded by migrants on their arduous journeys from South Asia to Europe, Mahmood collaborates with a Lahore-based film crew to reinterpret these fragments. Yet, the artist deliberately avoids recreating the migrants’ experiences. Instead, the work foregrounds the labour, improvisation and disarray encountered by the film crew – lost actors, scorching conditions and disjointed communication – echoing the struggles of displacement.

The work juxtaposes the poetic and the pragmatic, using soundscapes that starkly contrast the visual narrative, revealing the chasm between immediate experience and its mediated portrayal. Screenshots from the original videos punctuate the film’s reconstructed scenes, linking the raw urgency of real journeys with their stylised remakes. This interplay raises critical questions about representation, authenticity and spectatorship: how do we consume and interpret migration stories? What role does fiction play in unveiling or obscuring truth?

By layering the technical challenges of filmmaking with the lived struggles of migration, Mahmood constructs a narrative that collapses distinctions between fiction and reality. It is a compelling reflection on the politics of representation, exploring how stories of human movement are framed, fragmented and ultimately shaped by those who tell them.

– Eva Langerak

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