MISSING MIGRANTS
DIRECTED BY RAJ YAGNIK, KRES GENJIN
UNITED KINGDOM // 2020
2 MINS
The disappearance of a loved one is devastating for their family. Many families of missing migrants will never find out how or where they died, even if a body has been recovered and identified.
Reflective Encounters
“So often in film is the immigrant experience reduced to a simple binary, with stories either being a celebration of the hard work that enabled immigrants to prosper abroad, or ones that tread closer to reality and show the unrelenting hardship many face. In just two minutes, Missing Migrants (2020) broadens this perspective, turning the focus to the families immigrants leave behind, and the profound feelings of absence and uncertainty they develop. The film resembles more of an infographic, with a narrator consistently dropping informative facts and statistics regarding immigration.
Yet, there is a recurring visual metaphor that remains emotionally potent throughout: the absence of a family member is literally depicted as a missing puzzle piece in the bodies of those left behind, with families crumbling and losing pieces as they lose hope for proper contact. The film shows that no party is at fault, displaying several reasons for this lack of contact, including the precarious immigration statuses that prevent migrants from obtaining official support in tracking down their families. The migrants themselves are depicted as puzzle pieces, swapped through cold bureaucratic hands in foreign countries. As the film closes it hits upon a particularly sobering notion, that the crushing sense of absence families develop may become permanent, as many do not even know if their loved ones survived the immigration process.”
— Matthew Chan
Director’s Statement
Our twin goals are world domination and bladder control. In that order.
Filmmaker Bio
Raj Yagnik - is a prolific producer / director, his work spans comedy, documentary and animation. He has particular expertise in working with children and in challenging environments.
Often, but not always, commissioned by a charity or a UN agency. He enjoys collaborating and has worked with fantastically talented film-makers around the world.
Kris Genjin - Film maker, Illustrator, Lecturer, Animator, Doodler Extraordinaire...Welcome to the universe of iZeMo. A world of weird creatures squeezed out of his brainlobes onto canvas, paper, vinyl, wood, sculptures, tissue and computer screens. In his typical style, iZeMo observes the world around him, and crystallises it into his stylised, symbolic, metaphoric images.
He encodes what he sees around him into abstractions, in order to redraw the world in a way he understands it.
Coming from a background of animation and motion graphics, working for tv and publicity, iZeMo decided it was time to do his own thing and enlarged his domain by working as an independent illustrator, sculptor, graphic designer and art director as making his own independent animation shorts in different techniques.