Paradise (Laura Vandewynckel, 2014)

Impassable Gates

Laura Vandewynckel’s Paradise (2014)

essay by

13.06.2026

Within the first few seconds of the animated short Paradise, we see a white man walking through a sterile landscape reminiscent of an airport, pulling out a key to unlock a door through which he walks towards his private jet—except this door is invisible to us. In fact, there are no doors in this space, just a labyrinthine grid of white columns through which to pass. The invisibility of this threshold (and his unique access to it) speaks to the man’s privilege as a traveller from the Global North. The jet passes over a sea and reaches a patently more colourful land, where men contest each other to serve him and women dance for him to exotic music as he feasts on local food. The people in this “paradise” realise the white man’s fantasy of their land—with cultural entertainment and eager hospitality against sunset backdrops.

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.

Paradise

Laura Vandewynckel, Belgium, 2014, 6’

People are heading for a better place on either side of the ocean. Although their paths do cross at times, they never really seem to meet. Paradise is a light-hearted yet critical reflection on the ethics of tourism.

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.

Najrin Islam

This “crisis” also paints migration—a natural community impulse for survival, especially along shorelines—as a crime. It masks the violence perpetuated by border control infrastructures, whose coordinates of mobility and immobility are rooted in colonial logics of organising. In this film, these infrastructures bleed into each other—we notice that the sea carries debris from the white columns in the airport, and puddles of seawater are visible across the airport floor—both attesting to the porosity of maritime frontiers.

Laura Vandewynckel’s Paradise distills white desire for possession and entitlement into a clear picture of the wrongs they produce—contained in the neat dimensions of puppetry. The white body (coming from a world largely built on colonial loot) only wants the pleasures of the Global South without having to touch the bodies that inhabit it. But the migrant body from this part of the world resists it by getting on the boat to seize the life that is denied to them. Their movement towards a better life, towards their version of a “paradise”, is a protracted quest that is succinctly captured by our belated realisation that the coloured man crouched in the airport at the end of the film was present at the start as well—visible only as a reflection in a puddle of the water that had abandoned him in his Eden.

Bio Najrin Islam

Najrin Islam is a film critic and curator based in London, with research interest in archival politics and colonial infrastructures in Global Majority contexts. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview Asia, Art Monthly, Sight and Sound, Time Out, Ultra Dogme, ASAP Connect, and other publications. She is an alumna of the European Workshop for New Curators #2 and the BFI Critics Mentorship Programme 2025. She has served as a Programmer in the 2026 editions of Norient Film Festival (Bern) and London Short Film Festival, and is currently working on a series of programmes on South Asian cinema in the UK.