A Fateful, True-Life Trek

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Some 53,000 refugees are crammed into the Shamshatoo Afghan Refugee Camp in northwest Pakistan. Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi) and his pal Enayat (Enayatullah) want to reduce that number by two. The teens' plan is to reach London, where Enayat has an uncle, by any means necessary: guile, smugglers, bribes. That border guard has a suspicious look—give him your Walkman.

In This World is a road movie—a Silk Road movie. It is also a strange hybrid of documentary and fiction. Torabi is an actual Afghan émigré; he and Enayatullah more or less play themselves on their westward adventure. Director Michael Winterbottom (Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo) went along for the ride, often improvising dialogue with people the boys met. At times the danger seems real: rifle fire at a Turkish border, captured on infrared film, comes perilously close to the two boys—and the crew. Did the film put the lads at risk? This is an exposé that occasionally smacks of exploitation.

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Adaptability is the survival kit of illegal émigrés. The boys must be ready to change clothes, from peasant robes in Pakistan to business shirts in Iran to T shirts and jeans in Europe. They will have to travel by foot, bus, truck, ship—never knowing how long the trek will last or if they'll be shot, arrested or suffocated en route—and speed-learn the rudiments of new languages in the babel of countries they pass through. There's a sweet, sad scene in which Jamal teaches Enayat a few English words (snow, mountain) that would be of little use in England. And all this for what? If they do make it to London, they may be reduced to selling their organs for passports—an immigrant plight dramatized in last year's Dirty Pretty Things.

In This World mixes MTV-style camerabatics with the more staid tools of documentary style: time-and-place IDs, animated maps and a tendentious narrator who intones, "It is estimated that the U.S. spent $7.9 billion to bomb Afghanistan in 2001." Thanks for the stat, but we'd swear that Soviet soldiers, Taliban clerics, al-Qaeda mischiefmakers and one or two fratricidal chieftains all had a hand in causing the misery in Afghanistan.

The simple fact, one of economics more than politics, is that poor people want to be where rich people live. Jamal and Enayat are tracing the immigrant journey that created the Americas and is now remaking the face of Europe. In that sense, and for all its flaws and unanswered questions, In This World is the great human epic, rewritten in headlines and heartbreak.