The refugee and migrant crisis that gripped Europe starting in 2015 had not yet reached its peak when director James Bluemel got the idea to make a film about the journey.
Over the last two years, more than 1.3 million people have arrived in Europe after crossing the Mediterranean. Nearly 9,000 have died or gone missing along the way.
“We were watching the news, and looking at hundreds of Africans dying in the Mediterranean,” Bluemel remembered. Around the same time, a friend of his had returned from a trip photographing a migrant camp in Morocco. He returned with footage shot by several migrants of their attempts to cross the sea from Morocco to Spain.
“It was this really incredible footage, really visceral, unique access — because it’s taken by them,” Bluemel said. “We just thought, Christ, if this stuff is being filmed, that could be a really interesting way of telling the story.”
Bluemel and his team began filming just as the Syrian conflict was starting to spill out of the Middle East, with Syrian asylum seekers setting off for Europe in search of safety and a better life. “We were up and running, so we could react to that.”
In his new FRONTLINE documentary Exodus, Bluemel combines his footage with video filmed by refugees and migrants themselves. Viewers meet Hassan, an English teacher from Damascus, Syria; Isra’a, a young Syrian girl from Aleppo; Ahmad, who worries about his wife and daughter who stayed behind in Syria; Alaigie, a Gambian man who dreams of lifting his family out of poverty; and Sadiq, who fled Afghanistan to escape the Taliban.
