This Is Not a Love Story

Shot during the dismantlement of the refugee camp in the North of France in late 2016, the film features a most unlikely of couples -a Spanish anarchist activist who has chosen to live at the camp and a Sudanese man who feels like Europe has been treating him like a criminal since he first set foot on the continent and yet desperately needs to avoid deportation to almost-certain persecution and death. Will he, a devout Muslim, marry her, a feminist atheist, in order to get his papers and be able to remain in Europe? It's not so easy, we learn.It is with this intimate, humanistic tale that the film helps illuminate the violent shutdown of the refugee camp know as "The Jungle," in Northern France, at the time the largest ever on European soil. The camp, which opened January in 2015, was a shanty town that drew global media attention during the peak of the European migrant crisis in 2015, when its population grew rapidly. Migrants stayed at the camp while they attempted to enter the United Kingdom, or while they awaited their French asylum claims to be processed.It was located on a former landfill site to the east of Calais. By July 2015, it had 3,000 inhabitants and continued to grow. As well as residences, the Jungle contained shops, restaurants, hairdressers, schools, places of worship and a boxing club. Although estimates of the number of migrants differed, a Help Refugees census gave a figure of 8,143 people just before the camp's demolition in October 2016.By portraying that demolition process, the film asks tough questions about the development of "Fortress Europe," a hostile environment to migrants and refugees that has transcended the European Union's border areas and permeated its core.