by Felicity Fallon, Chair of Lake Aid
Lake Aid’s Film Night was in November 2021, and has remained on many people’s minds since.
We showed La Traversée, an animated film about two siblings fleeing conflict. Our aim was to raise awareness about unaccompanied minors and asylum-seeking families in Annecy.
In the film, a brother and sister get separated from the rest of their family and are forced to make a terrifying sea crossing, before being sold to another family, from whom they escape, before being imprisoned in appalling conditions, and escaping again. It is beautiful, and shocking, and sad.
Two days before the film, Lake Aid volunteer Guillemette told us that a group of 6 unaccompanied minors and 3 educators from a children’s home in Lathuile would be coming. Among them would be Z and O, two Afghan boys aged 16, who Guillemette has befriended through Lake Aid. Also, M a 17 year old from Guinea who another Lake Aid volunteer, Suzanne, has befriended and offered accommodation when needed.
As we watched the film, I became increasingly uncomfortable about the unaccompanied minors sitting in the front row.
These children had all experienced situations as devastating, if not more so, than the ones in the film. Events that had brought them to France, on their own, as children, without any family to care for them.
Was watching this film bringing up traumatic memories for them? Was it a bad idea for them to have come tonight? How would they feel during the discussion scheduled for after the film?
We had planned for each volunteer to go up on stage afterwards to talk about their experience of Lake Aid. First up were Guillemette and Suzanne.
I was sitting directly behind Z as Guillemette started speaking; the change in his body language was immediate.
Z shushed the teen who was next to him, and sat forward in his seat. As Guillemette started to talk about how much she enjoyed spending time with him and O, his face grew radiant. He continued to beam every second that she was on stage.
Similarly, as Suzanne spoke of the joy of becoming a ‘second family’, hosting and organising holiday camps for asylum-seeking children, once again the unaccompanied minors listened avidly, with massive smiles on their faces.
When Rino got up on the stage and recounted the challenges of taking a group of unruly teens cycling round the lake, he was greeted by grins and laughs.
What a relief, the kids had clearly loved seeing their ‘helpers’ get up on stage and talk about them.
However, this experience reminded me that we are still very much ‘finding our way’ with Lake Aid. There is no rule book to help us. The ‘refugee crisis’ started in 2015 and the situation is still evolving. Every new volunteer who joins us is a massive bonus.
We were therefore delighted to get an email from a member of the audience this week, saying that she would like to befriend an unaccompanied minor. We’ve also had more requests than usual to join our Facebook Group. The awareness-raising part of the evening certainly worked.
We don’t know what the long-term effects of seeing the film will be on those children.
We can only hope that the positive points of the evening outweighed any negative ones.
As they left the cinema, M said to Suzanne that he would have been happy to speak in front of everyone to tell HIS story. Ever since Lake Aid first met the unaccompanied minors we have wished they could tell their stories to a wider audience, so that people would understand their situation better. But we have never wanted them to feel pressured into it.
It seems that the Film Night has opened a door. We will see where that leads…and we hope that you will join us somehow, and at some point, on that journey.
A huge thank you to Claudia, Britta, Nerys, Jackie, Agathe and Carolina, who also presented different aspects of Lake Aid’s work at the Film Night. And of course to Isabelle Kumar and Talloires Cinema for being our hosts for the evening.
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