In This World

The refuge of the road: an odyssey for our times

It's not easy to discern a common thread to the work of the versatile and industrious British director Michael Winterbottom, but increasingly his forte seems to be to make films the hard way and make them look almost throwaway. In This World – this year's winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin – is an audacious undertaking that some might dismiss because it feels unfinished, in the sense of ragged round the edges. But In This World is so affecting and immediate – not to say timely – that the imperfections are integral to the package.

The simple story traces the odyssey from Pakistan to Britain of two young Afghan refugees. The two have their passage paid by an uncle; another relative has already made the journey and reported great things of Kilburn. But young Jamal and Enayat are effectively human contraband – shipped out and passed from one contact to the next, loaded from coach to pick-up to container, sometimes talking themselves out of trouble, sometimes unable to communicate, barely aware where they are or which language is spoken around them (the film is largely in Pashtu and Farsi).

Much of what we see is real – the places, the people, even (apparently) the events. Young lead Jamal Udin Torabi really was born – like his character, 12-year-old Jamal – in the Shamshatoo camp near Peshawar, and he and his travelling companion Enayatullah (his real name too) really made this journey, by all accounts under much the same conditions shown. Winterbottom himself followed the story's route from Peshawar to Sangatte together with writer Tony Grisoni, collecting real migrants' stories en route, before turning them into the outline for the digitally-shot narrative film we have here.

The result is nothing if not immediate. Often we can't tell whether incidents were set up, or simply happened and were incorporated into the narrative. In one scene, the boys are challenged on a bus by an Iranian checkpoint officer; if it's so convincing, it's partly because an Iranian officer insisted on playing the role himself. The film benefits from a serendipity that even documentaries can't always hope for: there's a wonderful shot, for example, where Jamal, embarking on his journey, is pursued by an insistent, giggling toddler.

Winterbottom and the director of photography, Marcel Zyskind, clearly saw many extraordinary sights, and sometimes there's a breathless sense of cramming it all in: nocturnal city bustle, flashes of roadside debris, fabulous desertscapes. Sometimes this reluctance to filter things out gives the impression of a film without real patience: ironically, since patience, enduring the monotony of the road, is the film's subject. Sometimes, however, the seemingly random image rush conveys a sense of the travellers being caught up in a process too rapid to make sense to them. Their journey isn't a passage from A to B, but is wildly fragmented: they move from stop to stop, constantly meeting the next fixer, whom they have to trust with their lives. Just when the voyage seems well under way, the boys end up back in Pakistan; after we see them trudging across a desert, they doggedly set off again with barely a word. This is migration as a game of Snakes and Ladders, to be bitterly endured.

There's a tragedy before the end, horrifying, and horrifyingly vivid because of the way it's shot; but without even pausing to take it in, Jamal is off again, pelting toward the next challenge. Such terseness means that the film will frustrate you if you want a coherent story with a cathartic payoff. It also affects our sense of the characters: figures barely figure before they're left behind on the road. Indeed, we only come to know the two extremely winning leads in glimpses, from their chat during stopovers. But that's what makes the film so real: this is a truly existential road movie, in which the characters are the road they travel.

Conversely, other viewers might wonder why Winterbottom didn't decide to make a straight documentary, and so impart more information about the situation of Afghan refugees. Some sense of compromise, apparently, has led him to insert a drearily-voiced documentary-style commentary explaining the background to Jamal's story. Additionally, a gruesomely tawdry 3D map traces the journey; but since Jamal doesn't know where he's going, and since we're offered the opportunity to experience things from his point of view, it surely would have made sense for us to feel lost too.

To some extent, In This World raises suspicions of being a well-intentioned but grandstanding stunt in the Werner Herzog fashion, film-making as backpacking bravado. And there are other questions to be asked about how well it really serves its young leads in enlisting them in a life-changing venture (as a closing title tells us, Jamal Udin Torabi himself, not just his character, remains in Britain but will have to leave when he turns 18). But whatever the theoretical objections, this is film-making with a fierce appetite for images of the world, and an intense curiosity about the reality of a subject which is about to rise even higher on the world agenda. In This World gives us a sense of what people like Jamal endure in the hope of changing their lives – the danger, arduousness and repetition of the road, the sense of purpose alternating with that of futility – and it does it in a mere 88 minutes that for once deserve that discredited epithet "epic".

j.romney@independent.co.uk