Waking Hours

Smugglers transport people across the border into Europe during an endless, sleepless night. A highly visual film, shot in pitch darkness, that should definitely be experienced in a cinema for the full nocturnal atmosphere.

Instead of following refugees, Waking Hours turns its camera on those for whom the border is a source of livelihood. The intensely atmospheric documentary offers a rare glimpse into the everyday lives of an Afghan smugglers clan who live in a camp, smoking cigarettes, cooking over a campfire and trying to pass time in woodlands near the Serbian-Hungarian border. There, they wait for the next opportunity to help exhausted migrants cross the threshold of Fortress Europe.

In conversation, smugglers’ personal stories emerge, revealing the manifold relations between migrants, smugglers and the border police. Instead of a one-sided condemnation, Waking Hours shows that in the context of restrictive border regimes, the vilified smugglers provide essential services for navigating dangerous routes. The smugglers in the film are Afghans who went through an equally dangerous and arduous journey, only to be pushed to the fringes of European society upon arrival, which indicates the complexity of their position that stems from sharing the suffering of those they transport.

Waking Hours was filmed in almost complete darkness with minimal equipment to avoid police intervention. The only light emanates from natural sources such as campfires and torches, but also from the protagonists’ cell phone screens and nightlights. The directorial duo transforms the all-pervading darkness of the night into an aesthetic device (some shots evoke candlelit night scenes from the mystical Baroque paintings of Georges de La Tour), but also a metaphor for the hidden life that takes place on the outer borders of Europe. From the circumstances in which Cammarata and Foscarini find themselves, they build a unique audiovisual experience, without losing sight of their concern for the uncertain fates of people on the move, but also of the humanity of their protagonists despite the ambivalence of their actions and the gray zone which they inhabit.