EUROPE'S NEW FACES Review: Harrowing Migrant Experiences

It's not like in movies from Hollywood: the real thing is down and dirty.

Europe's New Faces
The film opens Friday, December 12, only in select movie theaters. Visit the official site for more information.

With painstaking detail, director Sam Abbas follows migrants who have left Libya in hopes of a better life elsewhere. First, though, they must cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Hollywood has recreated similar journeys with great drama, depicted with crashing seas and rolling decks and crowded lower decks and swarthy men with murder in mind. In Europe's New Faces, Abbas does not hold back from showing crowded ships, but the journey, outwardly, is non-dramatic in the extreme.

Sometimes, the passengers exchange quiet conversations. Mostly, though, it's a journey carried out in the shadows, without much of anything to distract from the mind-numbing rolling of the ship on the waves of the Mediterranean, as the passengers care for personal hygiene and contemplate their future.

Arriving, eventually, in Paris, conditions in new housing is not markedly different from the drab onboard conditions the migrants endured. Rather than a temporary journey, the migrants now must deal with the horrors of enforced slavery, life-threatening medical procedures, and savage brutalities visited upon them.

A very real question emerges: Is migrating the answer? Because the film begins by documenting the dreadful journey away from Libya, we can only imagine the (likely) quite horrid conditions that drove so many people to flee for something better.

Without rushing things, Europe's New Faces envelops the viewer in a sobering reality that is not always pleasant to contemplate. It becomes a grueling experience, yet also one that allows room to consider the plight of vast numbers of people who are not criminals seeking to plunder the riches of the world: They just want a place of their own.