DIAGONALE sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The DIAGONALE Film Festival is a very special event to me. I’ve been to it for the third time this year, which practically means that I’ve been participating in it on a frequent basis since I came to Graz. Although DIAGONALE is supposed to be a festival of the Austrian films, it’s becoming more and more international every year. Consequently I always try to pick some non-Austrian film to watch (not that I have anything against Austrians, but I’m just looking for something “exotic” staying in Austria). Three years ago I even had a stoke of luck and found a film with Polish co-production on displaced people from the East who were made to live in contemporary West Poland after our country had lost its right to this land after the Second World War. That’s e.g. how I learned something new about the history of my home land.

This year I picked a series of three documentary films telling about children in different, to some extent extreme, life situations. An important point of my choice was that they scratch the surface of our summer semester’s topic – immigration.

In the first one of the films, “being u.m.f.”, we get to know about the legal situation of minor refugees in the Austrian refugee camp in Hall, Tirol. The director focuses mainly on the African refugees, almost all of whom flee alone to Europe. While they wait for the decision about (not) granting them political asylum, they often attend school or work for the community to kill the time. The biggest issues of this piece are whether it’s moral to get refugees to work in professions nobody else wants to do while paying them only 2 € per hour and how difficult it is to be in foreign surroundings without relatives, being dependent only on yourself. You can feel only sympathy for people in such circumstances.

“Gemma Kürtelkäfig” is a story of some emigrant kids from the second generation living in Vienna. We can see that they’re somewhere in between – they belong neither totally to the Austrian nor to their parents’ cultural circle. They speak the native language of their parents at home and German everywhere else. What struck me the most was the sheer idea of the Kürtelkäfig – a kind of fenced sports fields and small park surfaces around the Viennese inner city circle. These awful, tiny, prison-like places situated between streets with heavy traffic become an everyday shelter for the characters form the documentary. It’s where you encounter a mix of different backgrounds and learn how it is to be an Ausländer.

“In den Straßen von Delhi” distinguished itself from other two films as the most professional project. This co-production of ORF and SAT1 documents everyday struggle of a young street child in Delhi. Abandoned by his uncle at the age of nine, Sumid learns fast how to take care of himself. At the time of filming he can’t be older than twelve, but we get the impression that he thinks in adult terms. In specific he works in the streets collecting paper and saves the money in a children bank. However, he doesn’t neglect his school attendance and we can see that he’s one of the more talented kids. His dream is to start his own clothes shop one day and seeing his efforts and his “adult behaviour” we start to believe that he’ll make it one day.
The only doubts I had watching this beautiful documentary were about the morality of making such a film while you know that you’re making use of the topic and there are millions of street kids in India who you can’t help.