Introduction

Since 2010, over one million African migrants have left their home countries to reach Europe, taking them on unimaginably dangerous journeys across the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Migrant Sea is a multimedia documentary about their stories and voices, told in their words.

Synopsis

Migrant Sea is an online cross-platform multimedia documentary about the voices, stories, and realities of African migrants who have survived the harrowing journeys from their home countries to reach Europe. Intimate immersive, film, audio, and photo documentaries interweave with migrant-led essays, creative multimedia content – and more – to create an emotionally driven interactive exploration of the voices, history, and realities of Sub-Saharan migration today.

With different media, formats, and story paths, Migrant Sea offers audiences the possibility of experiencing these powerful journeys in their own unique way. Above all, Migrant Sea is an inclusive and collaborative project – with migrants and refugees narrating and in control of their own stories so that their voices can finally be truly heard.

About the Director

Born in Montreal in 1984, Stephane Grasso is a Canadian filmmaker and multimedia journalist. He has directed and produced documentaries, films, commercials, news, and music videos worldwide for over fifteen years. No matter the medium or the audience, Stephane has consistently aimed to produce content that advocates for human rights and highlights the voices of the unseen, disadvantaged, and oppressed. Whether it be in refugee camps in Bangladesh, First Nations communities in Canada, migrant communities in Sicily, or conflict zones in Southeast Asia, Stephane has always strived to create intimate, collaborative documentaries with underrepresented peoples to respectfully and authentically share their powerful voices and stories.

A Word from the Director

As the creator of Migrant Sea, I’m committed to challenging the prevailing narrative on Sub-Saharan migration. The primary aim of Migrant Sea is to rectify the underrepresentation of migrants by offering them a platform to share their voices, experiences, and stories. The project adopts an intimate, collaborative approach that ensures new, diverse perspectives, breaking away from the narrow lens that has dominated coverage of the issue so far and breaking through compassion fatigue – Stephane Grasso

Interview

Cinema Scholars’ own Glen Dower recently sat down with Director and Artist Stephane Grasso to discuss his new interactive web documentary, Migrant Sea. They talk about the incredible journey of Sub-Saharan migrants in trying to come to Europe, the benefits of working with VR (Virtual Reality), and Stephane’s plans for Migrant Sea, among other topics.

Interview

Glen Dower:

Stephane Grasso, the director of Migrant Sea, how are you, Good Sir?

Stephane Grasso:

I’m great. Thank you for having me.

Glen Dower:

And thank you for talking to Cinema Scholars today. Your new documentary is described as an interactive web documentary, I thought ‘Interactive? Let’s see how this goes.’ You’ve shared numerous stories in unique ways, and to start with, I want to jump to Cassa if I may, how was that filming technique achieved? Because we click on his story, it is truly interactive. How was that particular technique achieved where I can go watch his story and scroll around his living environment?

Stephane Grasso:

That was a Virtual Reality, or VR doc, as you know. This was an indie sort of version of this project. I want to sort of expand it and develop it more. But we shot with a GoPro Fusion camera, which is an old 360 camera. And yeah, I would spend a week with them. The doc is about a group home for teenagers in Palermo, Sicily. It’s a really interesting place because you’ve got both African migrant kids and Sicilian kids living in this group home. All these teenagers are sort of trying to build an independent life for themselves. Some of them go to school, and some of them are training for work. And it’s just a really interesting environment.

We have a lot of other docs in the project that are more focused on individuals, but this documentary was very much about the place and that’s also why there are two people. It’s the story of two of these young men. And that’s also why I thought this story lent itself to a VR documentary because it is very much about the place and the space. So yeah, I mean the VR docs I think are really powerful in terms of their potential.

I mean, I love cinema, I love editing, but having a documentary where you place people within a space of real events, I think it’s a very emotional experience. Especially combined with a voiceover and hearing people talk. The people who are on-screen talk about their lives. It’s very, very powerful. To this day, I think is underutilized.

Also, I think it’s extremely powerful storytelling, but from a production perspective, it’s really easy to shoot. You just kind of choose your moments and you just stick the camera there and you clear out and you just sort of let the moments happen. And then you do an interview and you sort of build on that. But it’s more about, I guess, choosing the moments and the positions of the camera. But yeah, there’s a lot.

It’s not as intense as traditional filmmaking and you also have to give up a certain level of control because you can see everything. That’s why you have to, as a filmmaker, you have to leave, you have to get out of the way. You can’t have lights or a setup. You just have to make sure that you’re in the right position and you just sort of let things happen, which is also why I think it’s really powerful because the audience’s experience is real moments. And I think that’s a very unique thing.

Glen Dower:

Because it gives your subjects context, doesn’t it? Because like you say, there are traditional documentaries in the project, like Jenni’s, where it’s one camera telling the story. Like you say a few shots here and there, but with that story, people talking off screen and you go click on Compass and you go where they are. It’s like real life. It’s almost a fly-on-the-wall documentary making would you say?

Stephane Grasso:

Yeah, I love documentary VR. I’d seen a few before making this film and we needed to do it. And like I said, it’s strange as an artist because usually as a filmmaker you associate hard work in terms of filming with something impactful and it’s the opposite with VR. Yes, you have to develop the projects. And Ancy is a very collaborative documentary where I had this very, very particular sort of set of ethical frameworks and collaborative approach with the participants to make sure that they had as much power and agency as possible over their stories.

Glen Dower:

Let’s talk about the story. I just want to read an extract of the synopsis if I may. So you say, as the creator of The Migrant Sea, you’re challenging the prevailing narrative on Sub-Saharan migration. The primary aim of the documentary is to rectify the underrepresentation of migrants by offering them a platform to share their voices, experiences, and stories. So why do you think you are the person to do that in this medium? For example, you and I are of a ‘similar demographic’, shall we say, why do you think you took this role on as a director to tell this group of stories?

Stephane Grasso:

That’s a really good question that I expect people to ask. Our demographic is like…white dudes. So from the get-go, this was something that I was thinking of because the purpose of The Migrant Sea was always to have a project where people could speak for themselves and could be a platform for them to share their stories and their thoughts and their emotions in their own words. But also authentically in a way that represents them. This is a reaction specifically to a lot of white male Western storytelling. The project itself was a response to the way the media had covered the issue specifically since 2014, and 2015.

Let me backtrack a little bit. Maybe it’s going to give you a little bit more context. And I think it’ll answer also why I took it on personally. So I’m Canadian-born, but I’m half French, half Italian. And I spent a lot of years, my childhood, a lot of months out of every year in Italy with my family. And I had, I’d grown up seeing these news reports of African migrants crossing to Italy and these search and rescue operations. So it was sort of normal to hear these things. And you would also see, whereas when I was young, Italy was a very homogenous society. It was a lot of white people. And increasingly as I was growing up, it was becoming more and more diverse. You’ll notice it when you go to Italy these days.

So I was noticing how significant these crossings were. And the thing that struck me is that this wasn’t being talked about more broadly by international media. That sort of changed after the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War when there were a million refugees from Syria and also from Afghanistan and Iraq crossing over through the Eastern Mediterranean, namely crossing to Greece. So that was around 2014, 2015. And that’s when the Western media started covering it as the Mediterranean migrant crisis. They also started increasingly covering Africans crossing over from Libya to Italy and, to a lesser extent, from Morocco over to Spain. But the issue with that is that they’re completely different sets of populations.

People from the Eastern Mediterranean were mostly refugees, so they were fleeing conflict, and stories that you would often hear were like, well, we’re fleeing conflict, but Syria’s our home. We would like to be there, but were forced out. But for Sub-Saharan migrants, we call ’em because they come from thirteen countries, thirteen African countries below the belt of the Sahara, which is a massive desert across northern Africa. And the Mediterranean is the last part of their journey. A huge part of it is crossing this super deadly desert.

But the main difference is the people coming from all these countries. Thirteen countries, and within each country there are all these different subsets of populations and there’s all these different push and pull factors. So certain people leave because of climate change, social issues or conflicts, or personal issues. And so all these stories are different and since for the past twenty years, over a million have made the crossing over to Italy. These are super dangerous journeys. So in 2014, and 2015, I noticed a lot of coverage, and there wasn’t much of a differentiation being made. It was sort of like, well, these people are crossing my boat to go to Europe.

So sort of the same thing. And the thing that upset me was also having sort of grown up within Haitian communities. I have a lot of African friends, some of whom came to Canada as refugees. I thought it disturbing that the coverage was really superficial and very told from the Western lens. So it was Western media, a lot of it was white guys to circle back to what you were saying, talking about hordes of migrants or just these large numbers of migrants coming into Europe. That’s how it was sort of being portrayed. Whether the intent was negative or not, that’s not the issue, but that’s how it was being portrayed.

And even to this day, I think the coverage of the search and rescue operations, which still happened because there’s one thing I want to emphasize is that African migration to Europe is never going to stop. It’s not going to, or at least not in our lifetimes, because there are so many reasons for it. It was really disturbing to me that the coverage was dehumanizing. That you didn’t see the individual, and for such a complex issue, which as I said, it’s like everybody has their specific reasons without even getting into the push factors and the West’s involvement in Africa. This plays a large part in why there’s a certain level of instability in many of these places that pushes people to go out. That’s a huge issue to do a whole series about each region.

So for such a complex issue, I found it disturbing that people were just portrayed as these anonymous black suffering masses of people coming into Europe. This is paired with a lot of the rise of the far right in Europe. And I mean everywhere in the world, the right tends to, sorry, not the right, no, the far right tends to demonize migrants because they’re sort of an easy target to blame issues on. That’s the case specifically both in America and in Europe. And like I said, I think that the coverage and lack of their voices in the coverage also played into that. It’s easier to demonize people when they’re kept anonymous. It’s harder for people to not relate to those stories when you hear them firsthand, where it’s people intimately sharing their experiences and their lives with you.

So that’s sort of where the genesis of it came from. It’s like both my personal experience growing up, the fact that I grew up with a lot of black and African friends, and there was the way that it was covered, and I happened to marry a human rights lawyer who focused on that issue as well. So she brought it back to my attention. And why did I get into it? I didn’t see many sorts of stories being told in this way. The broad majority of the coverage, like I said, was always very European. I wanted to create a project that was as collaborative as possible to give migrants as much power over their own stories and try to remove myself as much as possible.

Because I mean, as a filmmaker, you’re still, no matter what, still present in, it’s like the bottom line is that it’s in your hands. But I sort of developed this process where I wanted to do it, I wanted it to be as collaborative as possible. I can tell you a little bit more about that in a second. But as far as why I felt like I had to do it, I feel like I was in a privileged position given my background. And also just in terms of my skillset, my background in terms of, I have a personal connection to the issue of course, but I’m also a filmmaker with a pretty broad background having worked in multimedia.

I’ve done a lot of ads and documentaries and human rights documentaries in the past, but also for journalism, VR, and all this stuff on one hand, but also being French, Italian, and Canadian. I speak French, English, and Italian fluently. And to be able to go in and speak to so many different people, because you have to deal with not only having to communicate with migrants but also with the NGOs, being able to speak all these languages fluently was useful. And also sort of having this as an outsider’s perspective was kind of helpful in terms of, I think earning the trust of migrants who wanted to participate. I say that in the sense that a lot of them had pushed back against the documentary.

Some people refused to participate for reasons that I was expecting, but I think it was really important to hear a lot of them. Several told me it’s like, I don’t want to do this because I was already interviewed by journalists and I gave them an hour of my time and they took one quote and they put it without context, and I never saw anybody hearing my story. Nobody ever heard my story. So I don’t think that you’re going to be able to do anything with this. And that’s exactly why I wanted the project to exist. So yeah, just so being sort of an outsider from everywhere, but nowhere spoke all of these languages.

I also always brought that sort of perspective up to migrants when I introduced the project and it’s like, ‘I get it.’ You can hear it for a while probably. I think there’s an issue with how it’s being treated, and I would like to do something different. That’s how I introduced the project. That helped a lot. That being said, Migrant Sea is an evolving project. We have even more stories that aren’t on the website yet. If you visit in a year, it’ll look different. It’s also an evolving project that I want to expand later on. I’d love to make it into a streaming series. But yeah, a hundred percent of what you’re saying is completely true. My goal is, if I can expand this, I don’t want to be the only director. I’m even willing to let go of it.

I want to involve African artists, black artists, and filmmakers. And I want more people behind the camera, not just producers. I think that’s important. But from the starting point, it’s just, that I wasn’t seeing anybody doing this. So yeah, I just felt like I had to. But the goal has always been for it not to just be me, because no matter what, yes, of course, I’m like a white male. I can empathize. I have this wonderful doc in progress about a single Nigerian mother of two. But I’ll never understand all of those things. And I don’t know a single mom, I don’t know what it’s like to be Nigerian. Or what it’s like to be a woman. But I have empathy for it. So, excellent points. Thank you for asking. I’ve always kept that in mind.

Glen Dower:

It is such a noble cause because I was watching one story which also included an interactive map within a personal essay, I was affected by those stories professionally and personally. And personally speaking, because I’m from Ireland originally.

Stephane Grasso:

Oh really? Republic or Northern?

Glen Dower:

Northern.

Stephane Grasso:

Okay. Alright. It’s always a question I have to ask.

Glen Dower:

Cool, there we go. Then I spent many years in London, in the UK and I was there when Brexit was kicking off as in, ‘let’s get out of here’. The political agenda was ‘we want self-rule’ and our taxes to fuel our national health service, not other countries, but the migration and preventing of immigrants from entering was the reason the man on the street wanted to leave the European Union. Eventually, the referendum arrived with 51% of the British population wishing to leave. By that time I was living in the Middle East where I am currently.

I live in Doha, Qatar, and I work in education. Now, I have a class that includes students from Somalia, Palestine, from Syria. These young people are incredibly bright, articulate, ambitious, and intelligent. Significantly more so than their privileged local schoolmates. They want to be doctors, nurses, pilots, engineers. And like you say, you give one a piece on camera and you’ll say, well, she’s not a migrant. You say, why not? Oh, but she’s so intelligent, she’s so smart. And like you said, the dehumanizing factor of seeing people in boats ‘coming into our country, taking our jobs’.

It is just an eye-opener when you do see Jenni and the others tell their stories. So obviously if you want to be a showrunner, shall we say, with Migrant Sea, going forward, would you want to go to these little pockets around the world and see where are these people coming from and going to? We saw a journey on the map, the length of Europe, very much from Somalia to Italy. But across, you say across Africa, would you want to go to other pockets of the world? Going to Europe or the United Arab Emirates for example.

Stephane Grasso:

I spent time in Qatar, with some guys from Nigeria. You know what Qatar is like. They work there and I’ve spoken to some very easily just being there. And they were there for work and talking about how hard it could be. It’s a story. It was a deliberate choice. And it was hard at times to keep the focus on African migrants, but I think I sort of had to, there’s a couple of exceptions in stories that are coming up. But yeah, the focus being, like I said, I’m sticking to those routes because there’s so many people. It’s so complex.

But for a future version of the project, which is what I’d love to do, and which is kind of the reason that we’re starting with the festival circuit stuff right now, I would like to go back and maybe speak to people who intend on going on the journey or maybe who are going on the journey. And I mean, it’s relatively straightforward actually, because migrants who are in Europe are still very connected to their friends and family, some of whom are back in their home countries, and some of whom are on their unique journeys as well. But I would like to be boots on the ground. I would like to shoot a search and rescue operation, but that didn’t happen for various reasons.

Like I said, ultimately that wasn’t the point of the project either. It’d be sort of covered a lot. For me, what’s most important is getting stories from back there. There are a few media organizations who have honestly done a really good job at that, a lot of them. But I’ve seen some really good stories by the BBC and The Guardian from Africa. I mean, of course, Al Jazeera, you’re in Qatar. Al Jazeera is the best in terms of having an African presence, and the best resource. They’ve done tremendous stories. So I’d love to go there and work on that and in those situations. I think it would be probably very important to have also African filmmakers join us as well because, in that context, my skillset becomes a little less relevant than when we were in Italy.

But I would love to be there because this project means a lot to me. I just had a twenty-hour layover in Dubai. Dubai is another excellent example of this. It’s shockingly African in terms of most of the population. They’re migrant workers and a lot of Africans. So yeah, this is a story that I always try to keep in mind. That I think is important in considering migrants. I think migration is one of the dominant stories of our lifetime, to a certain extent. Migration has always existed. Borders are fiction. Borders are just stories that we tell ourselves. They don’t exist.

Now that they’ve become increasingly formalized, I think we pay more attention to them. That’s why migration is becoming more of a story unto itself. But now, with a transforming world, especially with climate change and these more rigid structures in terms of borders and countries, we’re going to be paying more attention to this. On the other hand, people have more reasons to migrate. We filmed this in 2019, and it’s taken me a while because I’m entirely independent and putting this together. And I’m still putting it together, but I think this will still be relevant, fortunately, for the project. Unfortunately for humanity, these kinds of stories are going to be relevant for a long time. It’s not going to stop. People aren’t going to stop crossing. COVID slowed it down a bit, and now it’s back to how it was.

Glen Dower:

A question is – is it modern slavery? Would you agree that especially in the Middle East, when you go around, we just had the FIFA World Cup, and obviously the news was on human rights, and now we’re hosting the Asian World Cup, and most of the staff are migrant workers below minimum wage! And you just think these people have come for a better life. All their wishes are noble. Their dinner for their families, like we say, their families back home, they’re trying to preserve their culture and their heritage, and they’re being taken advantage of. So migration fuels so many economies. Is that what you’re trying to also highlight? Is that why you go on the festival circuit as well?

Stephane Grasso:

I mean, as I said, it’s a complex issue, but if we’re talking in broader terms, I don’t think there are that many stories that sort of emphasize this yet. There are a couple of pieces of written pieces that do mention it on the website, but individual stories, don’t focus on it. But it is very important. Migrants are the backbone of all of our economies. It’s just, it’s Anton and nationalism is in terms of no matter what you may believe, just economically absurd. Alright, let’s have a look at post-war Britain. How did it rebuild?

Well, because all of a sudden, all of their former colonies from the Caribbean, Africa, Nigeria, India, and Pakistan migrants were welcome to come and help rebuild the country and work in the factories, which is why the country is significantly diverse now. It was the same thing with France, with their Algerian colonies in Germany. It was the Turks. They had an excellent relationship with Germany. So there’s a huge Turkish population that went there. Not to mention the US with Latin populations, namely from Mexico.

It’s the case everywhere in Thailand where my wife is from. Everybody who’s working in anything, they’re Burmese, they’re not Thai, I mean, in restaurants and stuff. So they’re really like the backbone of all these economies. And for African migrants, that’s also increasingly true in Europe. Italy has a declining population. It has an aging population. There are not enough births to sustain the population or the economy. So now we have a pretty far-right government in Italy with pretty hard policies on migrants. But it doesn’t make sense.

The only way that the country is going to survive is with a migrant workforce. And if you go in smaller communities in Italy, namely in Sicily, where it’s the poorest state in Italy, that’s when you do realize it’s like, oh yeah, the backbone. It’s these migrants, they’re working as day laborers. And you can see that in Qatar. You can see that in Dubai. You can see that in the US. Yeah, it’s absurd to say that they’re taking our jobs. It’s like, no, they’re the jobs that nobody wants to do and that are necessary for our economies to function.

So if you want to be cynical and see things from even disregarding their humanity, which is something that I’m trying to address with the project, but if you want to be purely brass hacks about it, it’s still completely absurd to say such things. This is beyond the fact that arguably a lot of Western economies were built off of the exploitation of a lot of resources in Africa and the continued exploitation of resources in many, many African countries. Yeah, I don’t want to be too political, but Britain, Belgium France, and the Netherlands don’t get to be this rich because of their natural resources. So yeah, I think we should think of that. Also, we think of when people come over, do we maybe owe something to them?

Glen Dower:

We hope. So. You are premiering your project at the Slamdance Festival. So what are your expectations, how do you want to present your work?

Stephane Grasso:

I’ve been out of the festival circuit for a long, long time. When I was young, out of film school, straight out of film school, I had my film, again, into Slam Dance, but that was fifteen years ago. The point of going to slam dance and getting on the festival circuit is to increase awareness, but also, as I said, to find more, to find interest in developing it further. And also find collaborators for future versions of the project to bring it into the future. And like I said, even possibly taking a lot of it I would say ideally, taking a lot of the control of it out of my hands.

Ideally, that’s the reason that I want to start going to film festivals and promoting it. Yes, of course, promoting the issue, but I want to develop, and find a way to expand it, because the point of migrants, see the point of it being multimedia, freely available multimedia website is to make it easy for people to access these stories. Also, giving them as much flexibility as possible in terms of how they’re going to experience the stories. And for Slam Dance, they’re doing for the digital category this year, they’re doing, it’s mostly online, so they’re reserving the screenings for the more traditional projects.

If this was a VR experience and a game, I don’t think I would be going to Slamdance Festival. But given the nature of the project being a website, that being the core of the project, the point is that it’s easily accessible. I saw that it was a really good opportunity because most films are limited to a screening. This project, for me, it’s just a question of showing up, promoting it, meeting people, and getting them to go on the website. And they can instantly go and watch and experience it. So I’m going there and we’re going to try to do that, put a bunch of QR codes everywhere, and talk to people and try to increase awareness, but also foster future collaboration. That’s the main goal.

Glen Dower:

So, is Migrant Sea, Stephane, your short, medium, or long term, or do you have anything else, any other threads spinning that you can talk about? Or is it all-encompassing right now?

Stephane Grasso:

I would say I would keep it to vibrancy. Yeah. I mean, as I said, I’m also a fiction filmmaker, advertising, and I have a few things in early development in terms of fiction, which is also something that I love. But the Migrant Sea, I think, has so many more places to go. And Slamdance is the beginning of its journey into the world. Finally. That is probably going to be my main focus for a while. Or at least if we’re talking about The Migrant Sea, it’s definitely what I’ll tell you my focus is going to be on.

To be more specific, I would like to make, always with the goal of accessibility, I would like to make it into a streaming series, like a limited series. The ideal scenario would be a series that would follow several migrants across the entire journey, because this was independently made, we had very little time. It was under two months, and I got two of my amazing filmmaker friends or professionals, they volunteered because they thought that the issue was important and we went and we did it.

But I would like to go back to make it into a more complex series with bigger means of production, and more support to be able to tell those stories sort of better, but still with the same sort of collaborative approach. So yeah, I would like to expand the website. That would be great to continue to tell stories like this. We’re still going to continue publishing some of the stories that we filmed, but the one thing that I would love would be to make a limited series, really, really covering these journeys always from their perspectives to reach a wider audience. I think streaming documentary streaming is like we’re in a golden age of documentaries because of those streaming platforms. So that’s what I would love to do. So shout out to Netflix!

Glen Dower:

I sincerely hope someone is listening, watching, or reading. Well, thank you so much for your time, Stephane. Best luck with the Festival and beyond. It’s been a real pleasure!

Stephane Grasso:

Thank you. Thank you so much for your insightful questions Glen, I appreciate it.

Stephane Grasso’s “Migrant Sea” is part of the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival DIG Program. For additional information, please visit migrantsea.com, slamdance.com and stephanegrasso.com

Read more Cinema Scholars interviews!

A LOT OF NOTHING: An Interview With Writer/Director Mo McRae

An Interview With THE APOLOGY Writer/Director Alison Star Locke

Keep up with Cinema Scholars on social media. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.