STOP-OVER / L’Escale

US Premiere • Documentary • France, Switzerland, 2013

DCP • 1.85 • Dolby 5.1 • Color • 100 min

 

Written and directed by: Kaveh Bakhtiari

Cinematography: Kaveh Bakhtiari

Film Editing: Kaveh Bakhtiari, Charlotte Tourrès, Sou Abadi

Original Score: Luc Rambo

Produced by: Olivier Charvet, Sophie Germain (Kaléo Films), Heinz Dill, Elisabeth Garbar (Louise Productions)

International Sales: Doc & Film International

 

A modest Athens apartment has become a terminal of lost souls to a steady influx of illegal Iranian immigrants seeking transit to a better life in the West. Hosted by the generous Amir, himself an immigrant, these shipwrecked men and women are marooned in a dehumanizing limbo while they try to obtain the forged documents and smuggler contacts that will allow them safe passage to their ultimate destinations. Most started out able-bodied, educated and with some means, but false promises and outright swindles have left them stranded in a hostile situation where a trip to the grocery store could cost them their freedom, or even their lives. Filmmaker Kaveh Bakhtiari went underground with nothing but a digital camera to make an intimate portrait of Amir, the boarding house “Papa” who watches over his flock of economic refugees.

 

While showing his prize-winning short film Suitcase (2007) in Athens, writer/director Kaveh Bakhtiari discovered that his cousin Mohsen had somehow managed to get around the walled and heavily guarded Turkish border and was also in Athens. Mohsen took him around to a laundromat converted to a tiny refugee camp for illegal immigrants. Bakhtiari was immediately riveted by this hidden world and it became the subject for this film, his first feature-length work, which was selected for screening at Cannes’ 2013 Directors’ Fortnight. Born in Tehran, Bakhtiari was raised in Switzerland and studied film at ECAL in Lausanne.

 

 “The strengths of Stop-Over lie in the personal and immediate, capturing the insecurity of people desperate to make a new, safer life for themselves, yet hampered by a system designed to be impenetrable.”

- Jay Weissberg VARIETY

 

“Each of Amir's tenants is afforded sufficient screen-time to establish their individuality, giving humanity and depth to what viewers would normally know only as a statistic or a headline.”

- Neil Young HOLLYWOOD REPORTER