Philip Scheffner

A small dark shape floating on sparkling blue sea. This scene extends throughout the duration of Philip Scheffner’s 90-minute film essay Havarie (2013). The subject, easily recognizable from photojournalists’ accounts, is the ongoing refugee crisis — the flow of African and Middle Eastern migrants seeking safety in an unwelcoming Europe. The film’s visual content is based on a 3 min. 36 sec. video clip shot by Terry Diamond, an Irish tourist on a Mediterranean cruise, which Scheffner discovered on YouTube. This surprising encounter between the massive ship, Adventure of the Seas, and a small rubber dinghy barely containing thirteen passengers, functions as the film’s silent centre. Revealing the potency of the nearly still video image is a soundtrack of voices sharing diverse stories of refugee experience — stories of hope, loss, and trauma.

Originally planning to incorporate the found clip as one element within a larger film, Scheffner conducted research and interviews. Concerned, however, that conventional documentary approaches eliciting sympathy by delving deeply into subjects’ lives only perpetuate the divide between victim and viewer, he radically changed course. Abandoning the visuals from his interview footage, he laid the collaged soundtrack onto the found clip, and dramatically slowed down the video.