Every once in a while the BBC has quite spectacular films that project into the future. They are of course known for their films of great works of literature, and for things that show up as multi-piece series on PBS's "Masterpiece" but they also fund films that are of good enough quality to be released in theatres: Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V", for example, or Michael Palin's "Remember Me." But it can be hard to find one you might have seen many years ago until you finally remember one of the actors in it.
I have always enjoyed Juliet Stevenson since far enough back that I can't remember the first time I saw her. The 1990 made-for-television movie "The March" seems like it could not possibly have been the first time, but it is the one I remember her in most vividly, even 25 years later. I finally decided to look it up, because this film, about refugees arriving in Europe, is/was very memorable.
It was closer to today than I remembered. And if you haven't seen it you should. It isn't exactly what we have now. But in its depiction of people streaming into Europe for help, for new lives, from a destroyed country, this film gets so much right.
Well, not right, exactly. It is an awful thing to consider that these people are poor because we are rich (the recurring theme in the movie and the uniting idea of the refugees from (Chad? Mali? Niger?) a land where desertification is making it impossible to produce even the meager crops upon which the Africans have survived up until now. There is an interviewer who asks, when someone says "We didn't cause this," isn't this a result of climate change we have caused?
While the movie makers were creating this tale of beaten-down people who found meaning in an escape to a better life, they predicted poverty and starvation as the reason for flight of thousands of refugees to European shores. This was filmed after the drought and famine in Ethiopia, so it is dated in that way. This was a Reaganesque/Thatcherite (or, more accurately, an anti-Reagan/Thatcher) view of the world. Focused on money. Not war, specifically. More than economic refugees (a valid reason to emigrate, to be sure, and the one most ancestors of white Americans had to immigrate to our shores), but not running from a war that has made it impossible to maintain any semblance of a community or even a family, in many cases.
The images in the last five minutes of the film, of boats crossing the strait of Gibraltar, shows boats loaded with what for today seems like a remarkably reasonable number of people. Maybe ten for a small boat, twenty or thirty for a larger one. Now this is a BBC production so they can't really do crowd scenes (not enough money to hire thousands of extras). And that is noticeable in the next scenes where people are streaming up the steps toward the lands of the Europeans, toward Spain and then further into the other countries ahead. But this limited number of people in the boats makes this scene seem almost quaint, and certainly dates it to the days before the Italians were picking up people from the sea as overloaded boats capsized off their shores.
But it is not all dated. The conclusion of the film gives us a very powerful climax, one that is the most prescient part of the whole story. As these migrants walk up to the gates of Europe, which are shown as real gates, towering over the steps from the sea, they are greeted by soldiers peering down from their heights, helmets on and rifles at the ready. That is where the film ends, of course, because the writers couldn't say what would happen next. And in spite of the events of this year, I would venture a guess that we still don't know what will happen next.
We are just, like the soldiers, and the people on the steps, hoping that something will happen to let the refugees pass this point without more disaster than they have already experienced. This is the clear message of the film: the hope, but the realization that it is maybe too idealistic. But this idealism is not unreasonable. These people, and the ones who are storming the gates (so to speak) of Europe today, have a right to life, a right to food and safety, and a right to expect that others will have the decency to reach our their hands to their fellow human beings. If we were in their situation, we should be able to hope they would share their wealth with us (whether that wealth is in food or in love or whatever medium that constitutes it).
I finally decided to look up the film, and rewatched it. On one of the databases I found via Google, it was classified as Science Fiction, seemingly because it mentions this event is the result of global warming. At the time I first saw it, and again today, I would not call it SciFi. In fact it isn't really speculative fiction through today's news lens. Perhaps that does make it speculative fiction, and as with good speculative fiction, it proved itself exceedingly plausible.