«A Refugee’s Guide to Rome» by Ted Efremoff

Watching «A Refugee’s Guide to Rome», in Rome, while for days, for weeks, the Italian newspapers have been reporting on the deaths in the Mediterranean of refugees from Africa and the blocking of the borders in the north-east, is particularly touching and intense.
Joseph’s voice, calm and profound, guides us against the backdrop of the city’s beauty, taking us far from Rome, to retrace what has gone before for so many men, women, and children.

A journey, in which Joseph patiently takes us, that although brutal and dangerous like few things in the world, is the only hope of so many desperate people.
The sea, and before that the desert, a march full of obstacles and with no possibility of return, in which one sees death in the face every day.
The montage constructed by director Ted Efremoff constitutes a kind of flashback, and the images of the rescues are a slap in the face that breaks the idyll of the Roman summer.
And even before that: war, Africa, the complexities of the customs of a world that from here no one really wants to know, to see, relegating thousands of children, of people, every day to ghosts sneaking around the cities.

This testimony, calm and profound yet so painfully intense, recounts what it means to be an immigrant in a large Italian city today, citing the myth of Aeneas, reminding us that migrations are structural phenomena in human history as well as a source of inspiration in classical culture, which have built all western countries as we know them today, and that there is, therefore, no urgency to defend our borders in the name of security but only to offer those in need the chance of a better life.