High Chaparral

There is a lot of discussion about refugees at the minute; on one had you have police underreporting sexual assaults at Stockholm music festival – supposedly for fear of appearing racist for doing so, but then on the other hand you have the undeniable need to do something to alleviate the human suffering caused by religious and political conflicts in the Middle East. With this being an election year in the US, and a time of much turbulence in Europe, it is understandably an emotive issue where too many people are on one extreme or the other.

It is quite refreshing then to find a piece about the refugees that doesn't push a heavy-handed agenda, but instead just documents a very small and unusual situation. This is the temporary housing of 500 refugees in a Wild West theme park in Sweden, while it is shut for the winter. The result is a quirky film which allows for plenty of interesting images around this situation, which then allows for the humans involved to be examined a little bit. One could argue that the film underplays the suffering and the problems of mass immigration, however I think it gets the balance right by mostly avoiding spinning off into an agenda. Instead it documents the situation in a fairly even handed way which is quite charming, interesting, visually memorable, and makes for an enjoyable film that has no drum to bang but lets the viewer take what they want – even if it is just the quirky imagery of Syrians living in a snow- covered Wild West town.