See Me As A Child
Imen Aissaoui
In Britain, refugee children are most often encountered as numbers. Arrival figures. Statistics. Percentages in a policy debate. See Me As A Child begins somewhere else – with one boy, his drawings and his memories of a flower garden in Ukraine. The work uses documentary filmmaking and editorial storytelling to place individual experience at the centre of a conversation that too rarely makes room for it. At a time when public discourse around migration has become increasingly abstract and hostile, the project asks what changes when a face and a name replace a figure. The question is not new. Practitioners working across photojournalism, documentary and charity communications have long understood that proximity to a single life generates something that data cannot – recognition. The kind that moves people. This is a film about an ordinary child who has lived through extraordinary things. It is an argument, made quietly, for seeing him clearly.
