Momodou is a young economic migrant who returns to his homeland of Gambia. He was smuggled out two years earlier with the aid and financial help of his family and is now being deported back from the U.K. When he arrives back home, he doesn't encounter a warm welcome. Instead, he grapples with rejection and anger from his brother and his father's worsening illness, as well as his own feelings of shame and acceptance. As tensions mount, Momodou must come to terms with how his family risked everything they had to fund his journey -- and the consequences of his return home. Directed and written by Cherno Jagne, who also plays the lead role of Momodou, this powerful and absorbing short drama chronicles the plight of the economic migrant from a different angle.
Instead of focusing on the often dangerous journey to a new country, its narrative examines the forced return home. In doing so, it captures how migrants aren't just uprooting themselves for only themselves. They also carry the hopes and expectations of their families and communities, who have sent them abroad to have money sent back to them. But when those expectations aren't met, home is a feeling that often isn't there anymore, both from distance and resentment. The film's visuals have a somber, naturalistic feel, opening with a muted, moody scene of Momodou in the U.K. on the way to the airport to be deported and then shifting to his homeland of Gambia. A thoughtful visual mutedness links both environs, capturing Momodou's apprehensive state of mind, which doesn't lift as he integrates back into his old life in Gambia. Though some members of his family are happy to see him, others are not, meeting him with silence and hostility.
The storytelling focuses on Momodou's attempt to navigate these tricky emotional waters, from his strained relations with his father to his own guilt and shame of being sent back home, the emotions underscored with a rich, lyrical musical score that adds dimension to a generally understated story. As Momodou, Jagne gives a layered, restrained yet deeply felt performance, capturing the helplessness of his situation with precision. Momodou's arc is generally internal throughout the film, but the storytelling also carefully charts growing tensions between Momodou and his brother, who has the harshest judgment of Momodou's return. And when it comes out into the open, it is stinging and humiliating. Absorbing and richly told, THE BACKWAY -- named after the migrants' risky route from Gambia to Europe, which finds them crossing both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea -- underscores the complex emotional plight of many migrants. Many do not want to leave, but poverty, food insecurity and lack of employment compel them to seek livelihoods elsewhere, often at the behest of larger family units that hang their hopes on their success. When they get caught in the crosshairs of political and economic winds stronger than them and are sent back home, it leaves migrants in a psychological and emotional "no man's land": wrested away from a place where they might have made a new life for themselves, but unsettled in an old home that has moved on while they were away. For Momodou, that crushing sense of failure creates a new stage in a cycle that grows more uncertain and perhaps even more perilous with each turn.
