“Filming these stories was sacramental work”
Today on World Refugee Day, we share an open letter by Maggie Morgan, an award-winning filmmaker and leader of SAT-7’s Gender Equality and FoRB project, on the life-changing experience of filming refugee stories in Egypt.
One of the objectives and deliverables of the Gender Equality and FoRB project in 2025 was to create video content – short pieces on deterrents to girls’ education. At this precise moment in the Middle East and Africa, the barriers to girls’ education are many. War and religious persecution are top of the list.
We filmed with young women (and also men) who came to Egypt to seek asylum and safety.
One young Eritrean woman said, “It is easier for the cats and dogs [of rich people] to have passports and to travel than it is for me… Animals are more respected than refugees.”
A Sudanese woman said, “I wish people wouldn’t use the word ‘refugee’; it makes me feel like I’m a burden to those around me.”
As with other relatively safe countries in the region, people have been flocking to Egypt for security, especially in the last two years. All these guests from neighbouring countries are waiting for final resettlement to Western countries that can give them official status. The dominant dreams of most displaced people are either resettlement or return to their homelands. Their bodies are here, but their hearts are elsewhere. And the waiting is indefinite, long and hard.
Here in Egypt, people from African countries often face closed doors, unreturned “good mornings”, discrimination and complaints. Egyptians say things like, “The refugees raise the prices; they’re taking our jobs…” Sometimes people take advantage of refugees. After all, they are the most vulnerable to theft, harassment, Gender-Based Violence and violence in general. Ironically, this discourse and jargon is targeted solely at refugees with darker skin! Most of us Egyptians haven’t looked in the mirror.
HOLDING SPACE
Filming these stories was sacramental work. Silencing the room to hold space for stories of pain and resilience purified our own hearts. We as a team of filmmakers were changed by it. Because when you truly listen, you truly change. We saw the fingerprints of God saving lives amidst human harshness and violence. His fingerprints were on the people who chose to be kind in a brutally harsh context filled with smugglers, abusers and fighters.
I want the world to know about the kindness I’ve witnessed when filming with forced migrants and asylum seekers in Egypt. It’s not the effort of governments, churches, mosques or international organisations that makes people survive. It’s the kindness of people towards each other. The least we can do as filmmakers, and as a SAT-7 team, is to honour their stories and stand respectfully in the presence of human suffering, the way we would be silent in sacred spaces. But silence and respect are not enough. We must think of and consider what else we can do.
I saw little kids, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Sudanese, give each other cookies and hold each other’s hands, spontaneously, without being told, because that’s how they’ve seen others do life. I’ve seen a Sudanese woman host a young pregnant Ethiopian teenage girl and call her “one of my own”. I’ve seen Sudanese families host one another and make room for one another in small, cramped houses in the last two years. Their small resources go a long way.
Kindness may not be noteworthy when it costs you nothing, but what I’ve seen in the refugee communities is kindness that comes at a very high price. Yet they do it anyway. We may practise an easy kindness, a giving or a generosity that does not disrupt our lives. They do the harder work, the work of carrying each other through the desert, of selling their mobile phones and possessions to bribe a smuggler to allow someone they don’t know to ride on the back of a truck with them. Together they somehow make it safely from one country to another, just by making room for each other in cramped spaces, by doing their best to ensure that no one is left behind.
MAKING ROOM
I am not trying to romanticise illegal immigration, poverty, war, persecution or smugglers and illegal passage from one country to another. Those are some of the harshest situations people can endure. But without kindness and without “making room” in already crowded spaces, no one would have survived at all.
These are the stories we want to tell, and these are the stories that are sacred, and hearing them is like entering holy spaces, where people are told to take off their shoes. It’s time to take off shoes and wash the feet of those who have travelled a long and rough road.
That’s why we wanted to film the piece called “The Chair”. Nowadays, globally, resources are becoming more and more limited, and yet somehow because of kindness and because of making room, refugees teach us the reverse of the old game of musical chairs. They have taught us that when the chairs are not enough, we either bring more chairs or learn to carry each other.
May we be people who hold doors open.
May we be the ones who bring in extra chairs.
May we be the ones who move over to make room.
May scarcity teach us generosity to resist hoarding.
May we be good listeners and learners.
And may there be no strangers among us.
Amen.