'The Last Shelter' Review: Scenes From a Rest-Stop on a Migrant Route Across Africa
'The Last Shelter' Review: Scenes From a Rest-Stop on a Migrant Route Across Africa
An arresting, artful, fragmentary portrait of a place of temporary refuge for migrants crossing Africa in pursuit of modest dreams.
Jessica Kiang, provided by
FacebookTwitterEmail
Running time: Running time: 86 MIN.
Courtesy of CPH:DOX
Caritas Migrant House sits where the semi-arid Sahel region gives way to the Sahara Desert, on the edge of the urban sprawl of Gao, a town of more than 85,000 inhabitants in the landlocked West African nation of Mali. But as the location of Ousmane Samassékou’s unobtrusively observant “The Last Shelter,” the refuge can feel far removed from such grounded realities. With a steady stream of travelers passing briefly through, as much as the house is brick and mortar, it is also a metaphor, for a kind of mid-flight mental state. On the edge of the middle of nowhere, at the very front of the back of beyond, and only 200 miles from Timbuktu — a name still defined in English dictionaries as “the most distant place imaginable” — the Migrant House is a physical and psychological rest stop for when you’re nowhere near where you’re going, but too far gone to go back.