In the densely forested hills above Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast, 57 young Indian immigrants await their fate in a shanty community they’ve built to avoid deportation. With lush visual style, the film accompanies them in their daily trials as they scramble to survive, waiting to cross the last 14 km that separate them from Europe. Will they make it there?
The protagonists left their homes in the poor villages of the Indian Punjab five years ago, selling their lands to buy passage to Europe and improve their life conditions. Instead of being taken directly, they found themselves stripped of their passports and passed from one group of smugglers to the next across Africa and through the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert. Along the way, some died and many were arrested or tortured. Finally after an odyssey of 2 years, this group of 57 managed to straggle clandestinely into Ceuta, only to find themselves trapped there, on the African side of the Gibraltar Strait: so close and yet so far.
After almost 2 years in the city’s migrant detention centre, with no solution for their case, and faced with a possible deportation, one night our protagonists decide to flee the centre and set up camps in the nearby mountains. In the shanty community ingeniously constructed from materials found in the forest, they weather the cold and rain and share daily tasks like cooking, hauling water and cutting firewood. They earn small change in town parking cars and carrying groceries and pool this money for food which they lovingly prepare in the Punjabi style over tiny fires at the camp. From the improvised lost boys´ “citadel” they try to make visible their unjust situation and attract the attention of the media.
The film approaches the experience of the group through a very intimate portrait of five main protagonists. Babu, Mili, Rocky, Happy and Guri are very different characters, thrown together by circumstances and bound to each other for survival against adversities of all kinds: political, climatological and psychological.. How do they survive? How do they evolve in the arduous struggle? What will they do to change their fate? Will they make it to Europe or else be deported back to India? The film follows the daily life of these young men during their 2 years in the hills, their hopes and frustrations, as they confront the hardships of surviving in the forest and reckon with their fate. It highlights the evolution of their relationships and attitudes as they confront conflicts within the group, homesickness and uncertainty, and reflect upon the geopolitical realities beyond their control which will determine their fate. The viewer shares in their anxiety as they await a solution, and joins them in an emotional conclusion.
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