#LIMBO FILM HOW TO#
#LIMBO FILM MOVIE#
#LIMBO FILM FULL#

The film is full of these tableaux that emphasize that the men, the islands, and Omar’s own inner landscape are all caught in between.įor the first chunk of the film, all this stylization - even in its most beautiful shots - can actually be a little stifling. The milky light that slides in over the Outer Hebrides doesn’t seem to cast shadows, so figures become sculptural, the white air isolating and showcasing them like a gallery’s white walls. Sharrock and his cinematographer, Nick Cooke, create a kind of diorama flatness in every scene: Omar’s cohort stares at a television in an underfurnished room the four stand in artful compositions, waiting to use a pay phone that sits glowing on the island’s wide moor.

#LIMBO FILM MOVIE#

In interviews, Sharrock has spoken about his love for The Band’s Visit, and you can see him borrowing the fish-out-of-water strategies from that movie here - particularly Eran Kolirin’s delicate use of embarrassment and the comic deployment of slacks and mustaches. The more the Scots pull weird faces, the more the refugees let their own go blank. The refugees, who have come from all over, are surrounded by an oddball collection of locals, many of them a bit bonkers (like the young people who do doughnuts in their car out on the sands), some garrulously racist. It’s not always entirely clear in these chilly, salt-bleached places what is sea and what is sky. Limbo was shot in the Uists, a set of particularly remote islands in the Outer Hebrides. His housemates are the eccentric optimist Farhad (Vikash Bhai) and two brothers, the soccer-mad Wasef (Ola Orebiyi) and Abedi (Kwabena Ansah). Our focus is Omar (Amir El-Masry), a gifted musician who has managed to get out of Syria with his grandfather’s oud, though he currently seems unable to play it. Will they be granted asylum or sent back? They are stateless, they are nowhere. These 20 or so refugees have already fought their way to Europe, and now they are suspended in a bureaucratic holding pattern. Instead of showing us rescue or escape or crossing borders, Limbo unfolds in surreal images of still pale landscapes or still beige interiors.

In fact, the main action of the entire first half of Limbo is “watching expressionlessly.” What else is there to do in purgatory? Scottish writer-director Sharrock wants to avoid the clichés of refugee dramas - the dangerous trip, the teary reunion - so he has cut all that movement out. The camera cuts to the room full of asylum seekers, who watch expressionlessly. They’re wearing the ’80s-ish clothing of the hopelessly awkward, and their boogie goes on far too long.

#LIMBO FILM HOW TO#

To teach a group of male refugees how to interact once (or if?) they enter British life, two dorky counselors do a stone-faced dance with each other, demonstrating acceptable displays of affection. The first scene of Ben Sharrock’s melancholy comedy Limbo takes place at a refugee holding center in the Scottish islands.

Limbo film