What does home mean to the nationless? A review of Anna Konik’s Silence Heard Loud
Imagine something so important as your identity existing in a purgatory between states? What does home mean to one who is nationless?
These are the questions posed by filmmaker Anna Konik in her film ‘Silence Heard Loud’ which is currently being screened for the 2022 Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Human Rights Watch is an international NGO that defends people at risk of human rights abuse and relentlessly presses those in power for change. Their annual film festival provides a platform for victims to talk about their own experiences with human rights violations, in a direct story-telling and exposé form. They prioritise space for identities, viewpoints, and experiences usually marginalised within the film industry, with an aim to encourage individuals on both sides of the camera lens to acknowledge human rights issues and make a difference in fixing them.
Konik’s film shows us seven individuals from six countries who journeyed to the UK in search of safety from violence, but their futures are still under threat from a system that views them as outsiders.
Some of these individuals come from places colonised and exploited by the French and British, the same countries that turn away at their greatest time of need. These individuals faced war, prosecution, human trafficking, and death in their home countries. One individual explains that their life at home consisted of sleeping with one eye open at all times. A common theme with the people in this film is the age that they were when they fled; 6, 12, 17 years old. For some, they were forced to flee or become child soldiers.
For these people, immigration was a leap into the unknown and meant giving up everything they had for a place to call home. They had no other option but to seek refuge. Once they reached the isles of Britain, what did they get? Nothing.
Many of these people arrived in Britain at the dawn of Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, in which business owners were threatened with fines or jail sentences if they failed to carry out checks to ensure people they encountered through work were in the UK legally. Migrants lost housing, bank accounts, and healthcare if they couldn’t produce legal documents. May’s hostile environment culminated in her office sending vans reading ‘Go Home’ around diverse parts of the country and boasting about immigration raids on social media. The victims in Konik’s film describe witnessing the anti-integration newspapers, stones thrown at their windows in school, and people telling them ‘you’re not our colour, you’re not our nationality, you’re not our culture’.
‘this is not your home’.
Because these young victims were not getting the care they needed, some had to go to drastic lengths to make ends meet. One individual talks of having to keep her head above the current, or risk drowning. Some stayed in garages, some were forced to live with abusive partners, some went homeless. One man talked of joining a gang, in which he was blackmailed, stabbed and shot, and ultimately went to prison just to break the cycle. The day he was due to leave prison, the Home Office detained him in a high-security detention centre, where he was left to be tortured by other gangs.
Many of the victims talk of prisons being better than detention centres, because detention is indefinite, and the Home Office has the power to put them straight back into detention at any time. The constant fear and paranoia is harrowing; some can’t see themselves bringing children into a society that dehumanises them so brutally. After all, it is impossible to dream in a world where you are not viewed as a human being.
The result of this dehumanisation is that many of the victims talk of having an extremely fragmented sense of identity; what they are cannot be found in one root, as someone explains. Where is their home? Britain, or the place they were born? This split identity works itself into every facet of their everyday lives; Britain is more focused on the individual, while some of the storytellers pride themselves on having large supportive families, sexuality and gender roles are completely different, some don’t understand jokes, some feel like they need to integrate just to please, and some think that the British laugh and cry too conservatively. Some think that it is deeply inhumane that we punish for stealing food, and some think that this country is too fast, while back at home it is far more peaceful. For one victim, her fears manifest when she sits on the underground train, being helpless to know if other people on the train are thinking of her as an undesirable foreigner or someone who can be empathised with.
For many of these storytellers, the relatives in their home countries are now gone. They have lived in this country for 20 years, and yet they are not at home, because they are not made to feel at home. They exist in a true purgatory; they can’t travel or leave, but Britain doesn’t want them here. The truly heart-wrenching part of Konik’s film is that there is no happy ending, albeit it explains that many of the individuals in the film have at least been given the chance to achieve further education as per a University grant.
Silence Heard Loud is a deeply humbling film that gets at the core of the institutional rot in Britain’s society. These people legally fled their homes expecting open arms, but the establishment reframed these citizens from being victims to being perpetrators and wore them down over time. The people that speak in Konik’s film offer a valuable and unfortunately necessary lesson about humanisation that one too many of Britain’s natives would do well to learn.
The true measure of a society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. The lives of these people cannot be changed unless enough of us stand up and say that enough is enough. No one can do it but us. If you are ready to take a stand, join us at https://findothers.com/ and build a campaign today.