Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen
FILMMAKER  -  ARTIST

Promised Land

(2011)

44 minutes

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Nominated for the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, 2013

 

Stranded on the fringes of Calais on France’s west coast, refugees plot and improvise—risking their lives for a chance to cross the English Channel to their “promised land.”

 

Fifteen years after its premiere, Promised Land returns in a newly re-edited and re-graded version, expanded with additional footage that deepens the film’s portrait of lives lived at the edge of Europe.

 

Promised Land follows a small group of men stranded in Calais, France—just 35 kilometres from the UK, yet separated by borders, surveillance, and the sea. Reza, an Iranian father, shelters with his three-year-old son Nima in a crumbling squat while waiting for a chance to cross hidden in a truck. Hassan, Jafar, and Mohamed circle the Eurostar terminal, ferries, and lorries, testing routes, timing, and luck—pushed onward by the same image of Britain as safety, work, and a prosperous future.

 

Filmed over eighteen months, Danish artist-filmmaker Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen and film photographer Jonas Mortensen gained access to migrant camps and hideouts where life is lived in the shadows. In a rare gesture of shared authorship, the migrants filmed parts of the story themselves on mobile phones and small cameras—and shaping how they are seen.

 

Moving beyond news reportage, Promised Land offers an intimate portrait of friendship, coping, and endurance, while exposing how human misery becomes a marketplace. It is a film about a last frontier—and the uneasy distance between a dreamed “promised land” and the reality waiting on the other side.

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Promised Land is commissioned by the Creative Foundation for Folkestone Triennial 2011 and is made with support from The Roger De Haan Charitable Trust, The Arts Council England and The Danish Arts Council.

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Director of Photography, Jonas Mortensen

Original music, sound design and mix, Mikkel H. Eriksen