The Strangers’ Case – Raindance Film Festival 2024

Writer and Director: Brandt Andersen

Watching this film in the same week as Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border will make you despair of humanity. Both brutally describe the plight of refugees as they attempt to journey to Europe. Holland’s depiction, all filmed in black and white, is heartbreakingly detached as it portrays the indifference of those who treat immigrants as numbers or animals. Brandt Andersen’s The Strangers’ Case plays on the emotions a little more obviously, but the result is just as devastating.

Holland’s film, which has been condemned by parts of the Polish Government, focuses on a group of refugees from Syria, Morocco and Afghanistan trying to cross the border between Belarus and Poland. They are sent back by Polish border guards every time they step into Polish territory, while the Belarusian militia steals their food and their money. The refugees are left with nothing but the clothes they stand in. This is not the Europe they were promised.

Both movies start with aerial shots. Green Border, colour changing to monochrome, shows the swamps and forests of the exclusion zone between Belarus and Poland while in The Strangers’ Case, a drone elegantly flies down the Chicago River where Syrian refugee Amira now works in a hospital. Nick Chuba’s siren-like score adds to the foreboding because soon we are in Aleppo in the middle of the war where Amira, a doctor, is finishing a 72-hour shift in a city hospital that is being hit by shells. When she tends a rebel, a government soldier aims a gun to her face.

From this moment onwards, the tension never drops. Bombs fall, children are executed and homes are destroyed. Although filmed in Jordan, Aleppo’s rubble-strewn streets are shot almost in a documentary style with people struggling to retain some kind of normality in their lives; birthday parties are held, children go to school and boys play at soldiers in the wreckage of war.

Like Holland’s film, The Strangers’ Case, its title from Shakespeare’s addition to the play Sir Thomas More, seeks to tell many stories, not just those of refugees, but of soldiers and the few good people who welcome the immigrants with open arms. In the play, originally written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, More tries to stop a riot by Londoners angered by immigrants from Lombardy. He says, in a speech now attributed to Shakespeare:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires…

This is the strangers’ case;

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

While we can only imagine what it is to be a ‘stranger’, Andersen’s film acts like a mirror to our inhumanity. People eating in a fancy seaside restaurant in Lesbos suggest that among the refugees coming to the island in small boats are terrorists while in Turkey people-smugglers count up their profits, not caring if the immigrants make it across the water alive. One of the smugglers is Marwan (a chilling turn by French actor Omar Sy) whose nefariousness is complicated by his own mission to travel to Chicago with his son.

Andersen’s film is harrowing enough, but the end of each segment, following a different family, finishes with a cliffhanger, which makes The Strangers’ Case needlessly melodramatic, making the viewer too aware that it is a film they are watching. In contrast, Holland’s portrayals of atrocities are shot in the same distant manner as the rest of her film, demonstrating how mundane violence has become to the soldiers and guards. Andersen’s thriller motifs threaten to fracture the verisimilitude of his story.

However, Andersen’s debut feature is a vitally important film and the reference to Shakespeare and the riots back in 1517 imply that we’ve learnt nothing in the last 500 years. The final shot of Andersen’s traumatic film, as Chuba’s ominous music returns, underlines this to shattering effect.

The Stranger’s Case is screening at the Raindance Film Festival runs from 19 – 28 June in London cinemas.