Director Introduction – Alex Nevill
Notes from Brook House contrasts attitudes toward immigration, which are heard in voice-over narration, with physical manifestations of the United Kingdom’s borders, which are revealed in slow-roaming landscapes captured on 16mm film.
Borders are typically considered as linear and definitive lines, so the film’s structural approach, which repeats a 360-degree camera movement in different border sites, became a method to challenge this convention. While filming, I was interested in showing the grey areas in between and around each site, rather than following the boundary lines directly. Borders don’t exist in the natural world, and the film encompasses this idea through a progression from very obvious boundaries, with fencing or security cameras, to invisible borders which are present across the country, but have no obvious trace, so can only be discerned by consulting a map.
I was also keen for the film to acknowledge the harm that borders can create without being extractive or exploitative in its approach. This led me to work with Detained Voices, a non-profit organisation that visits people in immigration detention, offering support and creating records of their stories or experiences. The writing they shared is anonymised for the welfare of each detainee and features in the film as testimony to the human impact of borders. Engaging local UK residents in conversation while filming each remote border was another key element of the project. I asked people that I encountered to read excerpts of the migrants’ writing to elicit their response and, in many cases, show the disconnect between empathy for an individual story and their wider hostile view on immigration.
Ultimately, by contrasting these stark viewpoints, images and voices, which each offer a different perspective on the same concept, I hope the film will show that a border is constructed in public consciousness just as much as in its physical presence.
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