In This World (2003) on Netflix
Jamal and his older cousin Enayatullah leave a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, hoping to reach London. Smugglers get them into Iran, and the two cross a mountain range into Turkey.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.3/104,554 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Two Afghan refugees, Jamal and Enayatullah, live in a camp at Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan. The two are cousins who want to reach London, and with no legal route open to them they buy help from people smugglers as they go. Their first attempt to cross into Iran ends when the police stop them and send them back; the second gets them through, and the two travel by road to Tehran and on to Maku, in the Kurdish part of the country. From there they walk over a mountain range into Turkey. In Istanbul they fall in with a larger group of migrants who are bound for Italy, hidden in a shipping container on a ship.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about In This World (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
In a case of life imitating art, Jamal Udin Torabi, who plays one of the two refugees reaching London, made the journey for real after returning to Pakistan and applied for asylum; he was granted leave to remain only until his eighteenth birthday.- To secure filming rights, the production team lied to authorities in several countries, having met government resistance in Iran and Pakistan.
- Most of the film was shot on location, but the scenes set in the Sangatte asylum seekers camp were filmed in England because the crew received hostility from the French inhabitants of the nearby village.
- The documentary-style drama was performed by non-professional actors with improvised dialogue, and the Iranian policeman who deports the two refugees is played by a real policeman re-enacting his normal work for the camera.
- Enayatullah, one of the two refugees in the film, was a market trader whom the filmmakers cast because they thought him "a nice guy".
- Enayatullah used the money he earned on the film to buy a truck, and now runs an import-export business between Kabul and Peshawar.
