How do you lift someone lying shackled on the floor? How do you carry him or her when they resist? How do you fasten a body? How do you push it up a gangway? What do you do when they scream? And how do you manage to deport a desperate person, who may be leaving a family behind, to a country where nothing but insecurity, poverty or persecution awaits them? These are the questions that young recruits of the Dutch federal police must face as they are completing a special training course in escorting rejected asylum seekers on their deportation flights.
Guido Hendrikx gives us, comprised in a few scenes, a tightly composed Direct Cinema insight into a practice that is common but mostly invisible to the public. While he avoids outright emotionalisation, he manages to disturb us nonetheless. Because we can’t evade this question either: what is humane? (and asking ourselves with some trepidation what we would do if an “escort” and his passenger were sitting behind us on a plane).

Grit Lemke

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Golden Dove in the International Short Documentary Competition 2014