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Despite the title, Michael Winterbottom’s earnest, ambitious, but conceptually flawed film takes place in no particular world at all. In This World tells a made-up story shot with non-professional actors in actual locations using documentary techniques and devices, but its fictional content and its non-fiction form subvert rather than supplement each other. No doubt Winterbottom’s intent was to dramatize the ignored plight of the world’s million or so refugees who resort to people smugglers to reach safe havens. Representing them here are young Enayat (Enayatullah) and his teenage cousin Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi), Afghans in exile in Pakistan whose elders have paid smugglers to ship them across treacherous terrain and borders to a new life in London. The journey takes on a Beckett-like air of absurdity from the beginning as they keep getting caught and sent back to square one, and Winterbottom’s digital video cinematography makes palpable the oppressive desert landscape and the even more oppressive outposts of civilization. The amateur actors, too, add verisimilitude and humanity beyond their status as victims, in particular Jamal, with his insistence on telling bad jokes. And their experiences shudder with the grit and the terror of truth. But Winterbottom’s insistence on the trappings of fact, such as an epilogue describing the fate of actor Jamal as if it were the fate of character Jamal, undermines the film’s veracity as a document and its intensity as a drama. (90 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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