Animated film: what if the war was here?

‘What if refugees fleeing was no longer something you knew from television but happened outside your front door?’ Bonita (23) sketches that image in her animated film ‘Torn’. The impressive drawings show the other side of the problem of refugees. Bonita: ‘What if we were in the position of a refugee?’

‘I read reports about refugee camps just outside Syrian borders. Millions of inhabitants and hardly any provisions. On the other side, I heard the reactions in my surroundings: in the Netherlands we already have it bad enough, there is no room to give shelter to refugees.’

‘What must it be like to flee?’
‘I carried both thoughts around with me. They could not be reconciled to each other. How could people think like this, what if the war was here?  That question is the basis of the film Torn, my graduation project at the ArtEZ College.’

‘Dredged up by my uncle’s shrimp boat’
‘The film is based on media reports but occasionally, it seemed as if it was the other way around. In one of my drawings, a girl is dredged up by the nets of my uncle’s Texel shrimp boat. The girl in the nets is fictional. But a few days after I made those drawings, I read the report that a Syrian refugee was found on the beach on Texel. The war had now literally reached my home.’

‘Refugees are more than a number’
‘In the news, refugees are a number: 90 boat refugees drowned, 1 million people on the run. With my film, I hope to give those refugees a face. Maybe it will help people to modify their opinion. Refugees are more than just that number.  They are people who are fighting to build a future in a safe country. Something that we in the Netherlands didn’t have to do anything for.’

Watch Bonita’s film ‘Torn’