Crossings is our creative campaign advocating for an international implementation of safe and legal passages. Today, there are practically no safe passages into Europe.There is very little information about crossings at European borders. In 2020, 80 000 asylum applications were recorded in Greece. In the last three years, more than 2,000 pushback incidents perpetrated by Greek and European authorities took place (Efyn, 2024), including violently diverting rubber boats from reaching European shores. 

 

Every day, the UK Home Office tracks the arrival of boats at its shores. For example, on the 9th of November 2024, 572 people seeking safety in the UK arrived on 5 small boats. 

 

There are currently no regional safe passages implemented by states and the EU to enable people seeking refuge to reach Europe and the UK. As a result, people who cross European borders face the unspoken violence of border controls. Whilst seeking refuge becomes more and more dangerous, these people are rendered ‘illegal’.

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This situation is detrimental to both host countries and people on the move. 

 

There is very little information accessible about how states manage their borders, and how they deal with people who arrive in Europe and the UK seeking refuge. Media coverage focuses on stories that conceptualise migrant flows as ‘crisis’. As a result, host countries are stuck in loops implementing short-term solutions instead of long-lasting integration of migrants. This results in alarming measures of drastic border control such as push backs or removal policies. Violence towards people attempting to cross borders is barely mentioned and often normalised. Border-crossings become dangerous experiences that increase the precarity of people on the move. For them, this is one more obstacle to finding refuge.

 

We invite our audiences to learn about experiences of border-crossing through film. We aim to humanise stories of people on the move, so as to de-escalate concepts that drive the state responses to violent border control. 

We build our campaign with film as our central medium of communication for social change. Our interdisciplinarity bridges expertise and people together, recentering arts and culture at the heart of politics whilst putting forward underrepresented communities. Our screening in November heavily involves young people’s voices, as three young people with experience of the asylum system will be taking part in our Q&A after the screening. In a world lacking radical compassion towards one another, we aim to foster intimacy through film, enabling for more nuanced and non-judgemental discussions on displacement.