Review of Jimmie (2017)
Seen in 2019.
A father and his four-year-old are refugees in central Europe, having escaped a possible war and/or regime collapse back home in Sweden.
Tendentious. There are moments where Ganslandt’s naturalism piques my interest, but his kid is not a good enough actor at four to carry the whole movie on his shoulders in medium shot. I assume this was done to build empathy, but it’s simply poor craftsmanship, just as it would have been poor craftsmanship to shoot everything from Jimmie’s POV or to have the kid hold the camera. Mere proximity in the absence of context does not build empathy, nor is it going to convince right-wingers to support the humane treatment of refugees. In this sense, it’s another The Deposit (2015), albeit with improved worldbuilding and craftsmanship almost reaching the level of a bare minimum. If you have to see white children suffering in war and taken from their homes, in order for you to care about refugees, then consider the four-year-old George in Three Came Home (1950): He builds more empathy because he exists in an intelligible story and context.