A Non-fictional Journey to Breech Divide
The short film “Pizza, Democracy and The Little Prince” shows Syrian refugee children seeking asylum in Istanbul, interacting with international students from all around the world. Through informal interviews, both discover common grounds and learn the power of human connections.
They notice shared interests in the simplest topics, such as their favorite foods, books, school subjects, or football teams. Then they go beyond small talk and ask questions about each other and their countries, getting to know about their different religious habits and present governments.
Moreover, with the candor and curiosity that only children have, they talk about how lonely they feel, the family losses they have experienced and conclude by asking one another about their worst fears.
Two of the Syrian children give the most striking answers, saying that they’re not afraid of anything, because there’s nothing to be afraid of. Furthermore, they happily offer to protect their new friends if they get scared. These replies are very unexpected, especially coming from children forced to flee their war-torn home at such a young age.
The German director Elena Horn stated that she chose this documentary style to address her need to “organize reality” in a clean and uncomplicated manner, so that children’s stories and emotions could clearly reach the audience.
In fact, she aimed to represent these children as they really are, without distorting reality or turning them into the main characters of a fictional story, as too often filmmakers are forced to do: this phenomenon leads to the creation of an unreliable and contradictory narrative that only seeks to satisfy the spectators crave for an intriguing story, rather than a real one.
In this connection, Paolo Romano - Regional Councilor of Lombardy - believes that, in the “Italian bubble”, it’s uncommon for refugees to be described as real people, while they are more frequently perceived as numbers or threats. On the contrary, "Pizza, Democracy and The Little Prince” tries to display their own identities and interests from children’s perspective.
In that regard, Paolo Romano draws attention to the fact that Italy has experienced migration in both ways, as a country from and to which people flee. Therefore, it’s paradoxical that now Italians perpetrate on others the exploitation and dehumanization that they suffered just decades ago.
This endemic failure to coexist and unite with migrants stresses the need to understand what integration means: it’s simply about multiculturalism. It is the intrinsic recognition of everyone’s right to maintain their own culture and religion, while respecting the language and law of the place where they live.
By internalizing this concept, as Marcello Rossoni - Head of UNHCR Milan Office- emphasizes, we must take a step forward and not only welcome refugees, but also integrate them in order to ensure a legal, pacific, and safe stay.
In the meantime, thanks to this short documentary, as Bocconi Labour Law Professor Maurizio Del Conte states, we got the chance to watch something touching that made us smile, like those kids, just being themselves, tearing down every kind of barrier and enabling connection on a human level.
Sofia Brogi
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