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THE HEARING

By Gerig LISA

Documentary - Completed 2023

Four rejected asylum seekers relive their hearing on the reasons for fleeing and question the core of the asylum process itself.

Festivals
& Awards

CPH:DOX 2023

Hot Docs 2023

Locarno Film Festival 2024

Panorama Suisse

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- SWITZERLAND
- Languages
- SWISS-GERMAN
- Duration
- 82 mn
- Director(s)
- Gerig LISA
- Producer(s)
- Maurizius STAERKLE DRUX (Ensemble Film), Eva VITIJA (Ensemble Film)
- Synopsis
- In an ordinary and grey office like any other, four people are waiting to be called in for a hearing. The bureaucratic setting is closer to a theatre stage, however, for in ‘The Hearing’ the participants re-enact their own real-life conversations with the government officials who will assess their case. A Nigerian woman, a man from Cameroon, a transgender woman from Sri Lanka, and a young Afghan man – all four are in the same situation with everything at stake. What happens when your future depends on your ability to tell your own life story in a convincing and compelling way? The tension between reality and staging, between role-playing and reality, does not make their life stories any less moving or relevant. In a simple but brilliant move, however, debut director Lisa Gerig reverses both the roles and the balance of power. The result is a (thought)provoking film of great dignity that uses the performative interventions not as a conceptual gesture, but to give a form to four individuals’ subjective experience of a system that is alien to most.