The Hearing (Die Anhörung)

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.

Accessible from 16 years and over

Moderator: Cordula Schnuer (editor-in-chief, Luxembourg Times)