“Europe’s New Faces is both a plea to recognize the humanity of migrants and a testament to our failure to do so.”

A couple of years ago Italian director Matteo Garrone gave us Io capitano, an odyssean epic about a young African migrant leaving his native Senegal to make the long trek to the promised land, Europe. While the film contained some harrowing scenes and certainly didn’t shy away from the dangers and terror migrants face on their journey, flights of fancy and bouts of magical realism, as well as the occasional focus to create a perfect shot gave the film a glossy sheen that diminished the impact of the drama thrown at its protagonist. Nothing of the sort in Sam Abbas’ latest documentary Europe’s New Faces, a sober look at what could be the continuation of the journey of Seydou, Io capitano‘s hero, and unexpected counter-programming to Garrone’s dramatized version of reality. Coming in at a hefty 150 minutes, Europe’s New Faces tests its audience’s endurance and will face basic criticisms about boredom, but fans of contemplative cinema will find enough to chew on.

Cut into two chapters, the film follows the titular new faces without actually showing many of them. The first half is situated in a Paris suburb, in a large squat housing around 400 migrants. As their days pass by in mundanity, eviction from the building is looming. You wouldn’t guess it from what Abbas shows though, at least not until very late in this section, as he presents the audience with a string of everyday activities, from scenes of people taking a shower or clipping their toenails (in an unexpected motif, this small act of pediatric care returns in the film’s latter half) to children playing or a mother breastfeeding her baby. At times Abbas gives us something less commonplace, like a C-section birth that rivals the beauty and brutality of Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, similarly showing that the emergence of life sometimes requires pain. But for most of the first section Abbas merely observes, documenting the lives of the nameless, faceless immigrants who have washed up on Europe’s shores, landing in places that, for one reason or another, don’t welcome them and don’t really know what to do with them.

Almost precisely halfway through its runtime Europe’s New Faces then cuts to the Mediterranean, as Abbas boards the Doctors Without Borders ship Geo Barents, a rescue vessel whose crew attempts to save as many people as possible from the overflowing, ramshackle boats that try to cross the small distance from Libya to Italy, a journey that also concludes Garrone’s film. It is not just the waves that threaten to swallow up these small vessels; they also have to escape the attention of the Libyan coast guard that attempts to take them back to their worst nightmare, often in cahoots with the human traffickers that pushed them onto the water in the first place. Early on, Abbas films a small, overcrowded ship coming under literal fire from the Libyans, and later shows the ship after it’s been set ablaze, a large plume of smoke towering over the vast, empty sea (to be sure, the coast guard did arrest its human cargo first; they also stole the ship’s engine for good measure). The film’s second half certainly provides the most dramatic, harrowing scenes, such as the belongings of the less fortunate floating on the calm, sunlit sea. And these are not the worst moments.

At some point the Geo Barents manages to save a group of migrants from succumbing to the water, and for the most part mundanity returns to the film. People pray to god, check their phones, eat a simple communal meal, and the toe clippings also return. In a way the film comes full circle by showing that life in the new place they will call home will be a continuation of the dull life on board the ship that saved them. But Abbas has some tricks up his sleeve that hit like a hammer. Two videos, given to him by the people he helped save, show the horrors they escaped, and eerily echo Io capitano again, which portrayed similar events in a fictional setting. The first video shows a large group of people in a too-small room, in squalid conditions. Most of them are sleeping on top of each other, and some bear clear signs of torture. The second one is shown, almost proudly, by one of the migrants who was forced into slave labor, working at a construction site in dangerous circumstances. Just two short moments, but they pack the film’s biggest punch, stark reminders of what Europe’s new faces had to endure before becoming a statistic and a focal point of Europe’s growing far-right sentiment.

And herein lies the film’s biggest problem: in an effort to portray the titular ‘faces’ without any prejudice and show them as they are, these fleeting moments of their brutal treatment are far too few to justify the film’s runtime and strengthen the attempt to make these people more than a headline, precisely because the film removes most context. The people are hardly given faces, much less given a backstory. Through its capturing of day-to-day moments that are more or less unrelated to their status as migrants, in particular in the film’s first section, it makes connecting to these subjects more difficult. The film’s second half fares better, which is in part why Abbas put the journey after the destination, but it still contains too much mundanity to make its audience understand or empathize with the migrant experience more than they already do. If Matteo Garrone does anything better in this regard, it is to give ‘the migrant’ a face and a story with beats that follow the non-fictionalized experience as depicted by Abbas so closely. No doubt another film that Europe’s New Faces will be compared to is Gianfranco Rosi’s masterful Fuocoammare, which is stylistically close to Abbas’ work, but which more succinctly makes its case by focusing on several individuals as opposed to taking a step back and trying to portray an experience.

Which isn’t to say Europe’s New Faces is without value. The fact that people have to create their own community and world while squatting illegally and in fear of being evicted in itself shows a failing system. The film does highlight, if only briefly, the inhumane journey migrants have to take to even reach that insecure world. From a cinematic perspective, the film is on several occasions visually impressive, if not downright beautiful, because of Abbas’ compositional talent and eye for cinematography; in this regard the film can definitely go toe to toe, clippings or not, with Rosi’s masterpiece. The film’s length can be felt, but once you get into its rhythm it opens up room for contemplation about the people it portrays, perhaps giving opportunity to fill in the blanks with one’s own imagination. Europe’s New Faces is both a plea to recognize the humanity of migrants and a testament to our failure to do so. Whether its adherence to an observational style that keeps the audience at arm’s length is the most effective way to make this plea is up for discussion.