Last year, Ai Weiwei gave us a brief glimpse at Tempelhof refugee life in his epic debut documentary feature Human Flow. This year, Brazilian-born director Karim Aïnouz focuses on the displaced lives of those living in the hangars of Berlin’s iconic airport, which closed 10 years ago. He hones in on the stories of an 18-year old Syrian refugee and an Iraqi medical student in his mid-thirties, filming their lives on a month-by-month basis. Aïnouz also makes the most of the airport’s architecture and the cinematic potential of its grey hangars, its white cubicles and the spatial make-up of the defunct location. In doing so, the filmmaker evokes an awe-inspiring and often eerie sense of scale, and offers an observational documentary that takes its time to deliver an empathetic perspective on an issue that is so frequently oversimplified and sensationalised by the media. Well worth your time.
Zentralflughafen THF (Central Airport THF) | Directed by Karim Aïnouz (Germany, France, Brazil 2018). Starts July 5.
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