Reflective Encounters

“The startling opening image - of a child strapped to a chair with a tar-like substance crawling up his arms - is tough to stomach, but tougher still is the reality which inspired You’re Not Home, Derek Ugochukwu’s bleak and ominous socially conscious horror about the terrors of Direct Provision. 

This degrading practice in Ireland, wherein asylum seekers are kept in overcrowded, dilapidated, and barely functional temporary accommodation, whilst being given less than bare minimum financially, often for years on end, is rarely condemned by observers here in the UK or elsewhere. You’re Not Home zeroes in on a clinical and precise depictions of this strange mid-space between imprisonment and freedom that Ikenna (Ashraf Tumuheirwe) and Chimba (Aaron Katambay) find themselves in.

Ugochukwu’s detailed direction focuses on the small touches: the sneer of a guard, the decay of a fence, the brothers’ slowly crumbling relationship, a hallucinatory use of African tribal imagery contrasting against the wet and eroding Tipperary landscape. It’s so effective, that the more conventional elements of genre filmmaking – the interplay of shadow and light, silence and noise – barely registers as different within Ikenna and Chimba’s day-to-day experience.

— Ben Flanagan