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EUROPA, BASED ON A TRUE STORY

By Kivu RUHORAHOZA

Drama - Completed 2019

Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza shoots his new film A Tree Has Fallen in London. It's a stylish drama about a mysterious Nigerian man who returns to London to make amends. Caught between the Home Office's Hostile Environment Policy and Brexit, Kivu's fictionalised world starts to merge with reality

Festivals
& Awards

IDFA 2019

In Competition Feature Length Documentary

Carbonia 2020

Feature-length Documentaries, Best Feature Film award

- Year of production
- 2019
- Genres
- Drama, Documentary
- Countries
- UNITED KINGDOM
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 92 mn
- Director(s)
- Kivu RUHORAHOZA
- Writer(s)
- Kivu RUHORAHOZA
- Cast
- Oris ERHUERO, Lisa MOORISH, Matt RAY BROWN, Paul MORRIS
- Producer(s)
- Simone SPANI (COCOON PRODUCTIONS), Maryellen HIGGINS
- Synopsis
- Intrigued by the British vote to leave the European Union, Kivu, an “African filmmaker” decides to make a film in London. If European filmmakers can make European films anywhere in the world, Kivu reasons that an African filmmaker should theoretically be able to propose a cinematic vision of the current socio-political state of a typical European city. In Kivu’s film, a drama titled A Tree Has Fallen, Simon, a mysterious Nigerian man, returns to London one year after his sudden disappearance to make amends with a few local characters. Simon first meets Joshua, his former pastor, who warns him against revenge and lust. Simon then goes on to visit Peggy, an elderly and sickly British woman he had befriended, bathes her and properly says farewell to her. A couple of days later, against his pastor’s advice, Simon resumes an affair with Anna, a racially ambiguous British woman, to whom he finally reveals the reasons behind his disappearance: he was an undocumented immigrant, an administrative ghost, for ten years with no way out, pushed to the brink of insanity by the cruel “Hostile Environment immigration policy” of the ruling Conservative Party. Meanwhile, Anna’s ex husband, Bruce, a failed white British theatre director, complains about all cultural funding going to promote diversity in the arts. In his effort to make amends, Simon pays him a visit too, and claims to have forgiven him for his betrayal. When Simon reminds Bruce of the particular incident that he is forgiving him for, the two men clash and Simon finally manages to come to terms with his recent past as an undocumented immigrant. In parallel to the fiction film A Tree Has Fallen, Kivu also documents the growing tensions between “liberals” and “conservative” on the
  public space. Inevitably though, the same infamous “Hostile Environment immigration policy” that disrupted Simon’s life pushes Kivu in a complex immigration situation that makes it impossible for him to keep working. His film progressively becomes a meditation on what we mean when we say that a work is “based on a true story”. At the end, Kivu is forced to take a decision, he walks into the Home Office Visa and Immigration Department to inform an immigration officer of his decision to leave the UK and hears one last scream of a desperate African asylum seeker next door.

EUROPA, BASED ON A TRUE STORY

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards