Mirages (Olivier Dury, 2008)

Every day, thousands of miles from here, dozens of people are driven by an incredible sense of hope to set out with the intention of arriving in Europe. During the first few days of their crossing from Agadez to Djanet, from Niger into Algeria, these emigrants are forced to confront the time of the desert with its stases, its brutal accelerations and its mineral inertia. The ordeal they undergo turns them into undocumented immigrants. But during their journey, this film considers them as individuals and for a brief moment steals them from the invisibility that awaits them. “In the beginning is this persistent vision that refuses to be forgotten. December 1998, an African desert. The sound of an engine in the dark, approaching headlights, an indistinct mass of human shapes crowded onto the back of a pick-up that emerge from the night and then disappear back into it again. This image, normally so fleeting, has become an obsession. I went back to the site of this apparition to make this film. I had to find the people I’d lost in the ones I’d find, with me going backwards as they moved forwards. For five days, the time it takes for a citizen to become an undocumented immigrant, they confront surroundings that are first and foremost an adversary, not a landscape. The heat, the cold, the deceptive vastness, the solitude. I aim to use my camera as much to reveal how time becomes palpable as to film the first days of some illegal immigrants heading off into certain oblivion.“ Olivier Dury