Impassable Gates

A different story unfolds in the sea that the jet passes over in transit. Two boats are heading in the direction of the white man’s land, both during his onward and return journeys. Teeming with people, the boats recall news images of refugee families risking hazardous conditions to cross water bodies. One of the boats even capsizes, drowning its passengers. When the white man returns to the airport at the end of the film, we see a coloured man crouched against one of the white beams. The white guy pushes the seated man’s hand (which was splayed on the floor in resignation) aside before walking past him in assured strides with his suitcase in hand. The contrast is deliberate—white people may go to Global Majority lands for pleasure, but god forbid the same people who served them should seek settlement on their land and in their company.

It is an interesting choice for the filmmaker to have colour-coded the humans in this animation, while also rendering them in the mould of Javanese shadow puppets. Called Wayang, these puppets are traditionally made of sticks derived from buffalo skin; here, they are a three-dimensional textile iteration. The effect is both funny and unsettling: the white man is literally rendered white while the coloured people are painted yellow—in a rather blunt indication of their racial distinction. Characterised by curious gesticulations, both figures are transparent enough to reveal their common skeletal support, with only the most evident differences in colour and genitals determining their hierarchical positions in relation to each other. Additionally, given how these shadow puppets are used for dramatic retellings of epics and mythologies, could the filmmaker be hinting at a modern fable of humanitarian horrors?

The brevity of the film is deceptive. In five minutes, Paradise scans what determines movement for racially distinct peoples. Borders seek to contain, and any transgressions are preemptively curbed through restrictive legislation or bureaucratic rigmarole. As architect and researcher Shahram Khosravi and Mahmoud Keshavarz point out in their article, “The Magic of Borders”, border fortifications—materialised through visa protocols, military operations, or propaganda media—facilitate mobility for the white traveller as much as they restrict it for racialised refugees. These restrictions simultaneously produce a rhetoric of care and control, and it is not difficult to guess which is meant for whom. The acknowledgement of the “refugee crisis” as such has also made us immune to images of shipwrecks and deaths in the water and on the shores, which get categorised as a natural offshoot of illegal movement across borders. This paints a starkly different picture than the viral reels that define much of the contemporary feed of travel media.