A confrontation between refugees and the Swiss officials who determine their fate takes center stage in director Lisa Gerig’s sharp exploration of the European asylum process. In The Hearing, Gerig asks four refugees to re-enact their conversations with agents from Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Migration. Each individual recounts the traumatic events which led them to Switzerland, while the agents try to establish whether the bureaucratic criteria for asylum is met.
Gerig expertly draws out the tension between the emotional stories of refugees and the allegedly objective metrics for establishing asylum. By underscoring the difficulty of probing traumatic memories for credibility, The Hearing calls into question the asylum process itself.
The screening of the film, in collaboration with neimënster, followed by a panel calling into question the metrics for establishing asylum, the complex relationship between memories and facts, and the European asylum process itself, with the director of the film, Lisa Gerig, Sérgio Fernandez (Political Director of ASTI and ASTI’s representative on the Collectif réfugiés Luxembourg), Amandine Truffy & Bertrand Sinapi (artistic co-directors, Pardès rimonim) and Ahmed Alabdulmohsen..
Born in 1990, Lisa Gerig studied film and editing at the Zurich University of the Arts. She later received a diploma in Documentary Film Directing at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where she won the Promotional Award for Young Students in 2019. With a longstanding interest in the asylum process, Gerig has worked as an activist and a freelance filmmaker for over ten years. The Hearing is her first feature-length documentary.
