On the Road to Relief

10,000 refugees stand in the balance between chains of aid workers and a regiment of riot police. These are the stories of how a refugee camp is sustained.

Documentary Short | Budget: £1600 | Running time 23 minutes

To watch the trailer click here.

The film was funded by the Emily Hobhouse Travel Bursary by the School of Film & TV, Falmouth University. Each year filmmakers can pitch a submission for this bursary to create a film about social justice, in honour of human rights campaigner Hobhouse whose activities during the Boer Wars fundamentally changed the nature of POW camps under the British Empire. Echoing the theme of camps, I developed the pitch treatment and went from there. I was successful in receiving the scholarship of £1,500, which covered the majority of the budget and made the production possible. 

The original pitch document can be found here. 

For thousands of refugees and those seeking asylum, the Calais Jungle Migrant Camp was a shelter and a haven. At its peak, there were 10,000 residents of the Jungle and at least 1,000 of which were unaccompanied children. However, the life-sustaining relief was not provided by NGO’s but a network of tenacious individuals, determined to pick up where the officials left off. Caught between the increasing demands of a growing camp and the regular police raids, this documentary reveals the chains of relief networks that entirely sustained the residents of the Calais Jungle over 8 months leading up to its demolition.