THE SWIMMER is a feature film-in-progress about Arash, an aspiring competitive swimmer and an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan. He asked me to make a film about the injustices done to him. I said yes. We started our work.
Seven years later, he disappeared.
THE SWIMMER is a hybrid non-fiction/fiction feature film that traces the surreal and fragmentary journey of Arash, an Afghan refugee and aspiring competitive swimmer, who lived for years in the precarious limbo of the European asylum system.
I met Arash in 2016, while interviewing unaccompanied minor refugees in a migrant shelter in rural Sweden. At the age of 17, Arash told me how he was required to repeatedly perform his story for immigration authorities, who misjudged his age, dismissed his testimony, and ultimately rejected his application for asylum and tried to deport him. Arash asked me to make a film about his life and the injustices he experienced.
During the 7 years we worked on the film, Arash navigated homelessness, labor trafficking, detention, and re-migration attempts across Europe. Migrants refer to this constant move from one country to the next without securing asylum as “the football match”. Then one day, Arash stopped responding to my messages. In his absence, I chose to collaborate with an actor, Ahmad Maher, to stage a series of imagined conversations between myself-as-director and Ahmad-as-Arash. THE SWIMMER is an innovative work of experimental nonfiction about forced displacement, representation, and the politics of visibility, accountability and ethics in contemporary documentary practice.
We are currently preparing for the final leg of production of the film, which traces Arash’s migratory trajectory in reverse, from Sweden through Europe, back to Hazara town in Quetta, Pakistan, where Arash journey started. Whether Arash is alive remains unknown; the film’s commitment is to honor his experience regardless.
Filming has taken place on constructed sets and on on-location at the sites that used to serve as emergency shelters for thousands of migrants in Sweden and the US. These spaces collapse into one another, resulting in what I call a cinema of dislocation.
Constantly asking “Who is speaking?” THE SWIMMER uses direct address, but the identity of the speaker—Arash, Ahmad, the filmmaker, or the imagined interlocutor—remains fluid.
Learn More: http://www.swimmerfilm.com