Maithili Patil I 20th January 2025
Limbo: A Film Review Exploring the Plight of Asylum Seekers
The image that the term refugee conjures up in most minds is that of people fleeing with scarce belongings, shepherded into crowded camps in nearby countries, awaiting essential and life-saving aid. A transitory scene marked by urgency that is prevalent in the popular imagination of a refugee’s journey. The scene that the film, Limbo (2020), posits is in stark contrast to this. It traces the journey, or rather, is characterised by a long pause that punctuates one of refugees awaiting asylum on a remote Scottish island. In vast, uninhabited landscapes, straight out of a Windows wallpaper, the pristineness of the landscapes in the movie speaks to the inanimate spirit of the island, lacking the bustle of human life and community, existing in isolation.
Watching Limbo, the quaint scenery with sparse human presence reminded me of a prison, despite its vast skies, lush greenery, and roaring seas. To think of going through a nerve-wracking process such as awaiting the grant of asylum, with hardly any people around and no work opportunities to distract oneself with, was a jarring thought. The relegation of asylum seekers to such a remote place is almost punishing, especially coupled with the denial of any work opportunities to occupy and sustain them with. The latter came across a major contributing factor in the infantilization of asylum seekers, giving them a living allowance to barely survive but not the enabling agency to live a full, independent life as adults.
The human interactions that asylum seekers have access to in the film are limited to the few instances they interact with the host community, including in the cultural awareness classes. The host community confronts asylum seekers with either indifference or disdain. While indifference still feels forgiving in relation to racist treatment, it is important to note that asylum seekers are not approached with care that is considerate of their predicament. It can be argued that a care-centered approach would further infantilize refugees, but adults need care too. To infantilize a person is to engage with them with a gaze of condescension that they cannot be trusted to be self-regulated agents of their will. A care-centered approach, on the other hand, would mean centering asylum seekers’ voices and experiences and building support systems around that. The existing systems of support, however, are hardly that, to the point of absurdity, as Limbo illustrates.
The film opens to a cultural awareness class, with a resource person simulating dancing at a bar to demonstrate that a woman dancing with you is not an indication of consent. The thought behind the exercise is not up for debate. The tools for conveying it, however, demand reflection. When a room full of puzzled male asylum seekers is mandated to watch host communities play-act like they would to children; the exercise fails to recognise asylum seekers as adults who have led full lives, weathered conflict, and fled to save that very life. The terms of engagement are skewed from inception, with the power dynamic between an asylum seeker and members of an asylum-granting state heavily inclined towards the latter. The infantilizing and patronising undertones of a cultural awareness class are an extension of this power dynamic that needs to be shifted towards more equitable terms. The beginning of that process is to understand how asylum seekers negotiate the arduous journey of having to leave behind lives they built and holding on to parts of it as they build a new one, in a foreign land, from scratch.
The film makes for a poignant and succinct representation of the decision to leave that asylum seekers are confronted with. Two asylum seekers, Wasef and Abedi, who met on the journey from the African continent, forge a relationship of brotherhood with Wasef taking guardianship of Abedi, to the point of Abedi crediting Wasef for bringing him where he was. Wasef dreams of playing football professionally, a dream scoffed at by other asylum seekers as unrealistic, weighed down by the reality of an unending and often unsuccessful wait for asylum. Abedi, all of 17 years of age, confronts Wasef with this reality, juxtaposing a teenager who ideally would understand, if not share, Wasef’s dream, being forced to reckon with the weight of the world. This is not lost on Abedi either, as he articulates, “He (Wasef) really believed… I was taking a chance. He was taking an opportunity to make his life better.” This sheds light on the diverse motivations and expectations of asylum seekers as they seek refuge, some full of hope for a better future and others not expecting much besides a mere chance to live; an interesting exploration of life as a fact of existing but also as the act of living.
In the aftermath of a particularly traumatic incident, the lead, Omar, expresses anger at his own circumstances of being forced to flee from Syria, surviving an absolute lack of regard for his and others’ lives. He has a heated exchange with another asylum seeker, Farhad, as follows:
“Do you ever think about who you were before all this?”
“I try not to.”
“Would you go back if you could?”
“I can’t.”
“But if you could, would you go back?”
“You don’t think I need to be here?”
“Why are you here?....You want to live your life like you’re in some American TV show? You won’t go back because your life amounted to nothing back home.”
“I wouldn’t go back…Because I cannot be myself back home.”
With Farhad’s revelation of his own reasons for not wanting to return to living in fear of being his true self, Omar is forced to confront what constitutes life itself, or rather a meaningful life.
A pivotal part of the film is Omar’s mediation of his own identity, beginning with the feelings of pride, guilt, and pressure. As a famous oud player in Syria, Omar struggles to reconcile with the fact that his father is now reduced to busking in the streets of Turkey as a refugee. Omar also tries to evade his guilt about leaving his homeland in the time of crisis, contrary to his brother, who has stayed behind to fight. Further, being in a country that is better off than the ones his parents are in, Omar is under constant pressure to send money to his parents. All of these leaden feelings coalesce into Omar’s relationship with his oud. As Farhad once points out, “You walk around like that (oud) case is a coffin for your soul.” And it is indeed that; the oud symbolises Omar’s soul, his sense of being, unwilling to let go of even when he can’t realise it, engaged in a constant battle to embrace it in his changed circumstances. So Omar lugs around his oud everywhere he goes, not once playing it.
In the course of his journey, however, through Wasef, Abedi, and Farhad’s iterations and the memories of his family and life before seeking asylum, Omar learns to embrace his soul despite his circumstances. Omar finds himself drawing strength from the communities he finds himself in, the community of his family and identity in the past and the community of other asylum seekers and locals in the present, to make sense of his dire situation and his personhood in the same. This highlights the need for a community-based approach to the asylum process and how it can meaningfully transform the isolating experience of awaiting asylum. Limbo calls for us to rethink how we, as varied stakeholders, engage with the limbo of someone awaiting asylum and support asylum seekers away from suffering in solitude. As the tagline of the film suggests, “Waiting is a group effort,” after all.