“Takes a refreshingly different approach to one of Europe’s hottest hot-button topics.”

“To me, Europeans are very cruel people.”

The number of films about the migrant experience, including the tough journey into Europe, has been on the rise in the last two decades or so, as Europe’s immigration crisis has been intensifying. Usually these films focus on the migrants, and not on the human traffickers that help them cross borders in the darkest of night and move into the land of opportunity unnoticed. In their debut feature-length documentary Waking Hours, Italian directors Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini turn their lens on these men and show that they are not (or at least not all) the soulless monsters out for money that they are painted as in other films. A mostly impressionistic work in which pitch black is the dominant color, Waking Hours reminds one of some of the observational works of Italian documentary master Roberto Minervini, so it is no surprise that Minervini’s production company co-produced the film. It’s easy to spot what he saw in the film, with no pun about the darkness of the film intended. But in contrast to his works, Cammarata and Foscarini do not provide quite enough to hold onto when it comes to these men who work in dire conditions to help others seek a better life. What Waking Hours does bring to light is that Europe isn’t the promised land these people were expecting it to be.

Contrary to what its title suggests, this film takes place in those moments when most people are still sound asleep and not even dreaming about waking. For a good chunk of the film’s runtime the image is so dark that all one can make out is the light of a torch or a warming campfire. The lengthy opening stretch of the film is wordless save for an announcement from the Hungarian border police making clear that we are on Europe’s doorstep, with nothing but the headlights of cars and other small light sources giving us something to look at in the frame. It will take a while before we understand that we are on the Serbian side of the border, in the deep woods where light barely travels. That is probably why the few human souls we see in the film feel so secure there. Living in makeshift tents and warming themselves by a fire, a dangerous proposition in any dark forest, these men are creatures of the night. The ominous border message signals the topic of the documentary, but through fragmentary conversations, either between the men directly or with ‘colleagues’ further up or down the long road from places like Afghanistan, it becomes apparent that these are not migrants themselves, but those who traffic them. They are Afghani too, and have at one point gone through the arduous journey themselves, facing the dangers that come with this odyssey.

That is probably the main take-away from Waking Hours: the dashed hopes of people looking for a better life than where they came from, being forced to the fringes of European society. The film’s flaw is that it doesn’t dig deeper into the few men it shows and give more of their backstory. A young man recounting his mistreatment at the hands of a female police officer (“a shameless woman,” he calls her) is harrowing and underlines the plight of migrants and their handlers as they trek across southeastern Europe, but we learn little about their feelings or the reasons why they got into this line of work. The film is impressionistic almost to a fault, a fly-on-the-wall (or tree, perhaps?) portrait of a group of people that purposefully tries to stay in the shadows, but leaves us groping for answers. That said, as a contemplative piece of cinema, with stupendous play between light and (a lot of) dark caught by the cinematography by Cammarata himself, Waking Hours takes a refreshingly different approach to one of Europe’s hottest hot-button topics.