Drift

This past weekend, I watched a powerful film about a woman adrift from her life because of civil war in Liberia. We track her day-to-day survival on a Greek island - where to sleep, how to find food, who to avoid for safety. When a boorish restaurant owner prevents her taking leftovers he will surely throw away, she sucks sugar packets until she learns to offer foot massages on the beach with purloined olive oil. Among the affluent tourists, a very few women grasp her predicament and understand her need to earn rather than beg.

The details get to you - Jacquiline’s quiet dignity, her resourcefulness, the flashbacks to her earlier life, the patient washing of her one pair of underwear which assumes greater significance as the film progresses. When she befriends an American tour guide, we feel the possibility of hope and even joy. But kindness erodes her defences and we bear witness as exhaustion takes hold and she slips between the present and her recent traumatic past. Friendship in such circumstances is complicated, tentative, fraught and the portrayal of Carrie, the tour guide, is finely wrought as she feels the weight of this history.

I was wrung out by the pain and beauty. What do we protect and why? How can we recognise and value each other’s singular humanity and particular story? What do we have to earn from Drift?