‘As Far as I Can Walk’ Review: A Search That Won’t End

Sitting within the cafeteria of a Serbian refugee camp, Strahinya (Ibrahim Koma), a Ghanaian soccer participant who helps run the camp, tells a pair of Syrian refugees that he and his spouse, Ababuo (Nancy Mensah-Offei), are financial migrants. “You from war zones have the priority,” he says dismissively concerning the strategy of asylum. Ababuo, an actress who then provides extra disrespect towards the Syrians a second later together with her personal dig, subtly chafes at her husband’s claims that, whereas they made it to Germany however have been deported to Serbia two years in the past, they’re now content material to remain.

It’s a scene stuffed with foreshadowing in “As Far as I Can Walk,” the Serbian director and co-writer Stefan Arsenijevic’s second movie. Soon sufficient, Ababuo will disappear abruptly with the Syrian couple, and we’ll observe Strahinya as he travels far and large in quest of her (the movie is a free adaptation of a Serbian medieval epic poem). But the change additionally gestures towards a sure queasy ambivalence the movie engenders concerning the relationship of the characters to the bigger political context.

Exceptionally well-crafted and anchored by transferring performances from Koma and Mensah-Offei, the movie is, in a single sense, an ideal work about that primary human want to lengthy for one thing higher, and the heartbreak that always comes with it. And but, whilst Arsenijevic fortunately doesn’t fetishize struggling nor flip his characters into political props, the movie unintentionally aligns with Strahinya and Ababuo’s crass angle within the cafeteria; as this Serbian parable about African migrants is about towards the backdrop of the continued Syrian refugee disaster, the disaster finally turns into simply that — merely a dramatic backdrop.

For some, like Strahinya and Ababuo, that’s certainly what some political crises are as they attempt to discover their solution to a greater life. At the tip of the movie, Strahinya sits on a bus, his coronary heart and can damaged. We really feel it for him, too. Yet as he seems out the window, scattered teams of Syrian refugees zoom previous, rendered faceless as they trudge alongside the trail within the chilly.

As Far as I Can Walk
Not Rated. In English and Serbian, with subtitles. Running Time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.