Les Films du Worso
“Quiet Life” by Alexandros Avranas, who won the Silver Lion award at the 2013 Venice Film Festival for his film “Miss Violence” is a gripping and oftentimes bitingly satirical exploration of a family’s struggle for asylum in 2018 in Sweden. The film follows Sergei (Grigoriy Dobrygin), his wife Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova), and their two daughters, who have fled Russia claiming persecution due to Sergei’s promotion of banned political texts at his school. The family’s hopes for a new beginning are crushed by the cold and harsh system of Swedish bureaucracy, which doubts the credibility of their story and dismisses their application for asylum, leading to a sudden medical emergency. Avranas presents a narrative where the family’s life is reduced to a series of inspections, interrogations, and regulations, all captured through a meticulously controlled and sterile lens.
Director: Alexandros Avranas
Year: 2024
Country: France, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Estonia, Finland
Runtime: 99 minutes
The film opens with the family moving through their small, confined home. The atmosphere is tense and claustrophobic, emphasized by Avranas’s precise framing and the methodical pacing of the camera. The calm is interrupted by the arrival of two officials, a man and a woman in gray coats, who begin questioning the children and their parents about their living situation. The officials assess every detail of the home, each room sealed with an electric lock, further symbolizing the family’s trapped existence in a limbo they hope to be freed from at any moment.
As the family, hopeful that they will receive asylum, discusses their future, the youngest daughter playfully asks, “Can I be Astrid? Tomorrow, when we will be Swedish, we will need Swedish names, right?,” followed by her assigning her family members their own Swedish name. This discussion exemplifies the family’s willingness to assimilate into their new environment. However, the situation takes a turn for the worse when their asylum application is rejected. Sergei’s claim of being targeted by Russian operatives for his political activities is dismissed as lacking credible evidence. The family has ten days to present new proof or face deportation. Their only hope is the testimony of their youngest daughter, Katia,
Their desperation increases when Katia, the younger daughter, suddenly collapses at school and falls into a coma. Initially suspected of poisoning, the family faces further scrutiny. However, the doctors diagnose Katia with “Resignation Syndrome,” a condition where a child, overwhelmed by stress and hopelessness, shuts down completely. The only cure for this mysterious syndrome, which hundreds of real-life migrant children in Sweden have been diagnosed with, appears to be the granting of refuge. Nevertheless, the prescribed treatment for Katia’s family involves separating her from her family, leaving Sergei and Natalia within a cruel system where they are forced to attend training sessions that teach them to remove stress from their lives and smile through it, despite the cause of their situation not being tackled as they still face deportation.
Avranas’s direction strongly portrays the emotional and psychological toll of the situation many refugees have found themselves in. Scenes of Sergei’s encounters with the authorities are marked by a coldness; his scarred body, his visible suffering, is completely ignored, and the family’s story is met with complete apathy and distrust from the people who are supposed to provide them safety. The irony displayed during the “training sessions” only adds to the display of cruelty in which this family is treated, and highlights the family’s invisibility and the family’s erasure within the system. Furthermore, the look of the film, in particular the officials’ interiors, consisting of sterile institutional spaces, devoid of warmth, perfectly visualizes the cold and emotionless treatment of the family throughout the film by the Swedish system.
Quiet Life is a powerful critique of a bureaucratic process that dehumanizes and alienates refugees in Sweden. It exposes the contradictions within a society that prides itself on being a liberal democracy and standing for human rights while subjecting vulnerable people to harsh scrutiny and control.
“Quiet Life” premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival where it screened as part of the festival’s Orizzonti section.
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