Writer and Director: David Bingong
Filmed in 2014, The Travelers shows what it is really like to be a migrant. A group of men from Cameroon live in makeshift tents on the Moroccan coast, planning their dangerous journey to Spain. They call themselves volunteers, men who have decided to go to Europe to make money to bring back to their families, broken by poverty. But beneath the disappointments in not being able to make it to the border or the tragedies that occur at sea, David Bingong’s film celebrates male camaraderie in the bleakest of situations.
Bingong explains at the start of the film that it is only now, in the present day, that he can return to his film footage and photographs and make such an honest documentary. He needed temporal distance, and it’s easy to see why. The camps with their homemade tents are surrounded by rubbish. It is cold, and the only money they have is obtained by begging. The bread they eat is three days old. And yet it’s home – even if temporary. When the Moroccan police set fire to the camp in an effort to disperse the men, it comes as a palpable loss.
But the men’s resolve is not broken. They see the situation as a war and refer to themselves as soldiers with each attempt to reach Ceuta, the Spanish city that lies on the northernmost corner of Morocco, just one battle in a longer conflict. They make up songs about themselves in French and Duala, a dialect spoken in Cameroon, mythologising their journey to the European Union. These songs seem well-rehearsed and also feature small details of choreography. Such mythopoeia gives them hope, an Odyssey that is predestined.
Bingong’s camera is never candid; the men always know that they are being filmed and often play up to the camera, singing songs and chanting. It would be enlightening if they were captured carrying out more mundane tasks to give a glimpse into the everyday horrors of such lives. But perhaps that would be an invasion of the men’s privacy, when such existence affords little privacy in the first place.
Knowing that Bingong has managed to reach Spain is a reassurance at the start of this revealing 60-minute documentary, but not everyone makes it. The scene in which they inflate a small dinghy demonstrates the danger these men are prepared to face. This sobering account of migrants’ attempts to reach Europe puts faces, names and life to the people we only know as numbers.
The Travelers is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
