‘Ils sont vivants’, an unexpected romance in the Calais Jungle by movie director Jérémie Elkaïm

“Ils sont vivants” is the first film of the actor and screenwriter Jérémie Elkaïm. It is an adaptation of the autobiographical book by Béatrice Huret, “Calais, mon amour“. This was the first realization of the actor and screenwriter Jérémie Elkaïm.

It is the story of Béatrice who, after the death of her husband, finds herself alone with her son and her mother. She is a geriatric care assistant and lives near a migrant camp in the French region of Pas-de-Calais, also known as the “Calais Jungle”. One day she decides to take her late husband’s belongings there and gradually becomes involved as a volunteer to help the refugees and migrants in the camp. There she meets Mokhtar, an Iranian migrant with whom she falls in love and who, like the other members of the camp, wants to cross the Channel and go to Great Britain by all means. 

The Calais Jungle recreated

 The real Calais Jungle was created in 2015 by the prefecture of Pas-de-Calais to house the 2000 refugees from the port area of Calais and was called at the time “le camp de la Lande”. The refugee population in the camp continued to grow in what became a kind of “city” covering about ten hectares, where churches, mosques, grocery shops and restaurants were created and which the local population renamed “The Jungle”.

 Due to the increasingly virulent demands of the local population, the Jungle is progressively dismantled by the police, which gives rise to protests from migrants and associations supporting them. 9 Iranians living in the camp even sew their mouths shut to protest against the demolition and Mokhtar, whom is portrayed in the film, is one of them. Eventually the order for the complete dismantling of the Jungle was issued for February 2016, so the setting was recreated for the film with the help and testimonies of former Jungle refugees who had been regularised, many of whom were called in to appear in the film.

 A challenging subject for a powerful film

Overall, “Ils sont vivants” is a moving film that highlights the atrocious conditions in the Jungle and more generally in all migrant camps and the work of the volunteers who are essential to the survival of these people whom all states seem to have abandoned. The images in the film, although harsh, depict the true story of thousands of migrants who have passed through the Jungle and who were willing to do anything to cross the Channel. A raw, poignant film, at once darkly realistic but also full of hope, which is worth seeing.