Crossings: Little Alien + discussion

1 Sep 2017

This screening is followed by a discussion with Charlotte Jamieson (from the NSPCC Child Trafficking Unit) and filmmakers Nina Kusturica and Sue Claytons, chaired by Dr Áine McMurtry

Crossings: Stories of Migration /// Little Alien discussion

Teenagers Juma and Hishame attempt an extremely dangerous journey to Europe, hiding in the chassis of a truck, where they will become the prey of border officers. Ahmed, Nura, Achmad and Asha haver managed to get over the fences. Jawid and Alem have already spent a year and a half in Vienna, hoping their asylum applications will be approved. They’re teenagers fleeing from crisis regions on a dangerous journey to Europe, all alone and hoping for one thing: survival. Upon arriving in Austria, they fight to lead normal lives, struggling against a system that demands they sacrifice their youth to an uncertain future.

Nina Kusturica’s prize-winning documentary charts the experiences of unaccompanied minors from Central Africa and eastern Central Asia who hide in the undercarriage of trucks, scale fences and undertake perilous sea journeys to Fortress Europe.

Little Alien TRAILER (english ST)

Little Alien , dir. Nina Kusturica, Austria 2009, 94min

As part of this event, we are also screening an excerpt from Calais Children: A Case to Answer by filmmaker Sue Claytons. As the Calais jungle was set to be razed in October 2016, there were over 1,900 unaccompanied minors stranded there - many of whom had a legal case to enter the UK.

Clayton fought to get these children recognised and their cases heard, but what would happen to the children otherwise? Calais Children: A Case to Answer follows a number of these young people over the following months since they left the Jungle. Read more about Calais Children: A Case to Answer.

Speaker biographies

Sue Clayton

Sue Clayton has been producing and directing films for over 30 years. Her debut feature film The Song of the Shirt on women in the garment trade was distributed globally. She made a number of award-winning documentaries for UK Channel 4 and Central Television including the Commodities series, Turning Japanese, How to Survive Lifestyle and Theme Park Britons.

Sue previously directed a award-winning film (Hamedullah: The Road Home) on a topic related to Calais Children: A Case to Answer, in which she gave a camera to a refugee boy deported at the age of 18 to Afghanistan from the UK. The film was distributed internationally and helped change UK policy on the forced removal of child refugees. Sue is also co-writing a book on child refugees for Policy Press.
Nina Kusturica

Nina Kusturica was born in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovinia in 1975 and has lived in Vienna since the beginning of the war in Bosnia‐Herzegovinia in 1992. She has made a number of documentary and narrative films and participated in domestic and international film festivals. Her thesis film, Auswege, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and opened the Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film in March 2003.

In 2003 she founded Mobilefilm, a film production company, with Eva Testor. Kusturica writes articles for books and periodicals, teaches at the University of Vienna, and conducts directing and editing workshops.
Dr Áine McMurtry

Dr Áine McMurtry is Lecturer in German at King’s College London. Originally from Northern Ireland, Áine McMurtry studied French and German as an undergraduate and carried out postgraduate work at the Universities of Hamburg and Oxford, where she also held a Junior Fellowship at The Queen’s College from 2007-9. This fellowship enabled an extended residence in Vienna to research in the Manuscript Department of the Austrian National Library.

Before coming to King’s in September 2012, Áine taught at the University of St Andrews, as well as at Durham, where she was lecturer in German from 2010-12.

This screening is a part of Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation State [PDF] (King’s College London, 31 August – 2 September 2017), an international workshop examining cultural responses to issues of transit and the place of the nation state in an era of mass international displacement.

Crossings: Stories of Migration is an ICA-led UK-wide film and events programme supported by the BFI using National Lottery funding and in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University