"When talking about the problem of refugees, we use
dehumanised language, which reduces human tragedy to numbers and statistics.
But this suffering concerns real people, who – just like us - have families,
loved ones, friends; their own stories, dreams, goals... Only when you sit down
opposite a specific person and look into their eyes, you no longer see an
anonymous refugee, one of the migrants, and notice the human before you, just
like yourself – loving, suffering, dreaming.
20 years ago, psychologist Arthur Aron discovered that 4
minutes of looking into each other's eyes can bring people closer. Using this
discovery, we decided to carry out a simple experiment, during which refugees
and Europeans sat opposite each other and looked into each other's eyes.
Clearly, it is most important to give each other time to better understand and
get to know each other.
The experiment was conducted in Berlin: the city, which -
first of all - is a symbol of overcoming the divisions, and secondly, seems to
be the centre of the contemporary Europe. We wanted the movie created on the
basis of the experiment to be as symbolic as possible – and to touch upon the
general divisions between people.
The experiment participants were ordinary people. The
situations were not staged; we wanted to get natural, spontaneous reactions.
The people sitting opposite each other had not known each other before and saw
each other for the first time during the experiment. What is important, the
refugees mostly came from Syria and had not been living in Europe for longer
than a year."
