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Back to list The Little Refugee (aka Aylan Kurdi)

Director’s Profile

Batin Ghobadi was born in Baneh, Iran. He began his artistic career as a painter, before writing and directing short films The Painter (2000), Surely Today (2002), Incommunicado (2003), Broken Soldier (2004), Ready for Death (2008), and Ask the Wind (2010) - which won the Crystal Bear at Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. Mardan (2014) was his debut feature. It was selected as the Iraqi entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards 2015, and premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in 2014.

Synopsis

In September 2015, 3-year-old Kurdish child, Aylan, is playing by the sea in Bodrum, Turkey, when he finds a corpse on the beach. Moving closer to the corpse, he realizes that it is himself. Aslan is living in the basement of a 5-star hotel with his wife and sick child, waiting for a better opportunity and a more reliable vessel to take them all to Europe. Since he cannot trust human traffickers and their boats, he stays in the hotel and works hard, accepting any task, so that he and his family won’t be turned out. Every three days, traffickers take another load of refugees out to sea on their old boats, giving them fake life vests to wear. The majority of them drown. A few manage to swim the rest of the way to Europe. Aslan’s sick child was a victim of chemical attacks in Syria. He’s been dead for two days now, but his wife holds tightly to the body and refuses to believe that he has passed. At midnight, after repeated efforts, Aslan finally manages to separate the baby from his mother. He carries the body of his son to the seashore and buries him. While doing so, he notices the presence of Aylan (his ghost) and takes him to his wife. Her sorrow is alleviated somewhat by seeing Aylan. Qader is a Turkish human trafficker who is getting rich through the misfortune of the refugees, who pay him for passage to Europe. The night before the next scheduled trip, he runs off with a huge sum of the refugees’ money, leaving them all stranded in the rubble and ruins by the shore. Aslan is the most distraught of all the refugees, but he must do something to give hope to his wife and the others. Not far from where they wait, a 40-year-old man named Bahman is building a boat, now with Aslan’s help. Bahman has built his own vessel; in fact the metal trailer of a huge truck which he found in a junkyard and has converted into a boat. The building work is now complete, and the boat can carry 200 people. At midnight, all the different groups of refugees who hide out in the ruins by the shore should be on board. Everyone believes that this great hunk of metal can take them safely to Europe. Aylan’s spirit presence is a source of hope throughout the story; Aylan who is himself dead. Only dreams can ease the pain and disappointment of these refugees who have been forced from their homelands.

Achievements

2020 Sao Paulo International Film Festival
2021 Moscow Kurdish Film Festival
2021 Duhok film festival

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