Michael Winterbottom: Worlds apart

Michael Winterbottom set out to make a film about refugees and found himself in the middle of a war zone. 'In This World' has now won huge acclaim in Europe - so why will it be so hard to see here?

In Britain, Michael Winterbottom is regarded with (at best) grudging admiration. In Europe, the 42-year-old Blackburn-born director is revered as one of the bravest and most versatile talents of his generation, a film-maker equally at home helming Thomas Hardy adaptations (Jude), westerns (The Claim), or downbeat dramas about urban alienation (Wonderland). At the Berlin festival earlier this month, they made a big fuss of him. Festival boss Dieter Kosslick cites In This World, a digitally shot, documentary-style tale about two Afghan refugees travelling west in search of a better life, as the perfect film for a festival taking "Towards Tolerance" as its key theme. The film went on to win the Golden Bear.

There was much less fanfare when Winterbottom arrived in Peshawar, on the Afghan/ Pakistan border, for the first time in November 2001. Back then, the bombing campaign in Afghanistan was still going on. Historically, the town had been a stronghold of the Taliban and anti-Western feeling still ran high. "The odd thing was that everybody there felt that September 11 was not the work of Osama bin Laden. Even his biggest supporters all felt that it was either a Mossad or CIA conspiracy," Winterbottom remembers. "Everyone felt it was all a stitch-up in order to justify controlling [oil] pipelines."

He and his writer Tony Grisoni visited the local camps, including Shamshatoo (where the beginning of the film would eventually be shot). They attended anti-bombing demonstrations where kids were milling around selling Osama T-shirts. They passed through the border city of Quetta only three or four days before Independent journalist Robert Fisk was beaten up by Afghan refugees there. Winterbottom admits to being apprehensive before the trip began, but says: "In spite of their uniform hostility to what was going on in Afghanistan, people were incredibly friendly to us."

There are estimated to be around a million refugees in Peshawar. "That's one city," Winterbottom points out. "Compare that to Britain, where there are 150,000 refugees in the whole of the country ... we in the West give very little aid to them. That means a country such as Pakistan is having to deal with all the consequences of a million people arriving in one city and all the stresses and burdens that creates."

After leaving Pakistan, Winterbottom and Grisoni followed the old Silk Route, which took them from Iran to Turkey, on to Italy, and finally back to the UK. En route, they collected stories from asylum seekers and migrants. As part of their research, they also visited the notorious (and now closed) Red Cross reception centre at Sangatte, near Calais. "The conditions there were pretty much like conditions in the camp in Peshawar, except that in Peshawar it's outdoors, sunny and dry, whereas in Sangatte they all lived in a big warehouse," Winterbottom says.

Their journey is the same one that the Afghan refugees make for In This World. For Jamal and Enayatullah, it's a gruelling and often humiliating trek. The duo are treated like cheap contraband by those they've paid to smuggle them across borders, and like pariahs by any officials they have the misfortune to meet. It isn't as if nirvana is waiting for them either. The best they can hope for is a cash-in-hand job as a waiter in a cheap restaurant in London. "And that's not necessarily much different to what it would have been like if they'd stopped [earlier on their journey] in Istanbul, Tehran or wherever," says the director.

Winterbottom was spurred to make In This World by his revulsion at the hardening of the West's attitude toward refugees. "The starting point was this increasing hostility to immigrants: the idea that they shouldn't be allowed to come to Europe and that if they did, they wouldn't be allowed to stay unless they could prove the most extreme circumstances were against them," he remembers.

He had read newspaper accounts of the 58 Chinese immigrants who were found dead on arrival at Dover and was intensely curious about the circumstances of their journey: "how they got here, where they set off from, how much money they paid, the risks they took, the route they took". Winterbottom wanted to allow audiences to imagine what such a journey might be like.

He describes In This World as a road movie, albeit one in which there is a huge amount at stake. "If you imagined being on that journey, if you followed that journey, even if it's only for an hour and a half, you'd want them [the refugees] to succeed, you'd want them to be welcome ... there are a lot of very basic stories to be told in situations like this, stories of life and death. Leave aside the social and political context, these are people who are really risking their lives."

Winterbottom cast two unknowns, both Pashtuns (traditionally the most religious and reserved of the Afghan peoples) in the lead roles. The older one, Enayatullah, spoke no English. The younger actor, Jamal Udin Torabi, was discovered by the casting agent in one of Peshawar's language schools. "We were looking for two people who we felt would be able to survive the experience and wouldn't find it stressful. One of the benefits would be that they would get paid, which would help them, whatever the experience of the film itself was like."

In effect, Jamal and Enayatullah were making the journey for real. Though accompanied (and looked after) by the film-makers, they were encountering cities they had never visited before and being put in situations of which they had no experience. Winterbottom and his team didn't always have the correct papers or visas and so had to resort to many of the same ruses as the smugglers used to get the actors through border posts.

Since its Berlin success, the film has sold all over the world. In the UK, it will get a relatively limited release – a sign that no one expects it to be especially popular. Few of Winterbottom's movies, even big-budget efforts such as The Claim and Welcome to Sarajevo, have been box-office hits. There's a sense, though, that In This World could buck the trend. Not only is it topical, but it's also an impassioned and courageous piece of storytelling, which works equally well as travelogue, documentary and drama.

Depending on your point of view, Winterbottom is either a chameleon-like figure with an uncanny ability to reinvent himself from film to film, or a director who dabbles in so many genres, and works so quickly, that he leaves no footprints behind him. On the face of it, In This World has little in common with his last feature, 24 Hour Party People, a sprawling, tragi-comic account of the misadventures of Factory Records boss Tony Wilson (the man who signed Joy Division and The Happy Mondays). However, both films share the same dynamic and improvisatory feel.

Winterbottom denies that the travails of a supremely egotistical Mancunian record boss such as Tony Wilson (memorably played by Steve Coogan) seem inconsequential in comparison with the life-and-death struggles of the two refugees on their epic journey west. "What happens to Tony Wilson is just as important to Tony Wilson as what happens to Jamal is to Jamal," he states. "Everyone's life is important to them."

Ever prolific, Winterbottom is already half way through shooting a new movie, the sci-fi drama/love story Code 46, starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton (the producers allowed him less than a day to come to Germany and he has had barely any sleep; he yawns constantly, and apologises each time).

There's a strange postscript to In This World. With his proceeds from the film, Enayatullah, who has three small children, has been able to buy a lorry and set up his own import-export business in Peshawar. Jamal, however, decided to come back to London. (He didn't get in contact with Winterbottom for three months: "I think he was a little bit nervous that we would be angry with him for having done it.") He's now living with a foster family and is doing really well at school. He has been given leave to stay until he's 18 years old; he'll then reapply for asylum. "To what extent his coming back was because of us is not entirely clear. I'm sure it was partly to do with that," Winterbottom concedes. "We would like to help him as much as possible. We've been away filming so I haven't seen him since Christmas. But we'd like to help him ... we'd do anything we could to help him."

'In This World' is at the ICA London SW1 from 28 March