The subject of the refugees is inexhaustible: when the cruel, albeit inevitable, normalization of a migration crisis begins to establish itself, another geopolitical or climatic upheaval opens the door to a new wave of human drama, interrupted destinies, and forced uprooting. As an answer to the issue, new gestures of solidarity emerge and new hopes begin to glimmer, as well as new polemics, as nationalists and chauvinists feed on the people’s fear of the unknown, and new barriers are erected. The movie authored by Thomas Ash chooses to position itself outside the eye of the storm, far from the frontier zones where masses of migrants are in transit, or even from so-called lands of promise towards which most of them head to. “Ushiku” makes us enter a refugee center in Japan, a country rarely associated with migration issues. The reason behind this apparent calmness is an extremely harsh and poorly mediatized asylum policy, which conceals major human rights violations – a situation which Ash, from his position as a Westerner long-established in the country and as a volunteer in the refugee detention centers, aims to document. The movie is thus composed of materials recorded with a hidden camera, which renders another, no less cruel side, of the fate of exiles from all around the world: instead of dead bodies lying on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, or the chaos of the Calais Jungle, we are faced with the Kafkesque labyrinth of a deaf and mute administration, in the meanders of which individuals risk losing their identity. What Ash’s camera documents, though, are the inmates’ methods of resistance, therefore asking us to acknowledge their right to a place in the world – an incontestable right in theory, which is yet so contested. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)