"Familiar Strangers - Fallen angels”

In this short film, we want to show the migrant as a fallen angel who was expelled from the sanctuary of belonging, grapples with the loss of status and sense of safety.

Migration sets off a ceaseless conversation between familiarity and strangeness. Over the years, this strange familiarity has become the migrant’s new identity - it pervades her experience of living, loving and dying. The passage of time sheds light on some of the corners of the new country, its social fabric, cultural beliefs and linguistic nuances while others remain confusingly dark and alien. By forging new affiliations, the present of the host country grows familiar; yet, its past stays forever intangible. In the same way, the once a home country becomes increasingly a sheer memory, frozen in its black-white past, and its present-day unknown and discomforting.

It is these familiar strangers that doctors and nurses come to meet as patients. Each patient brings a cargo of stories to the clinic. We believe Caritas to be curious about the strangeness of the ‘other’. Strange patients become familiar in recognition of our common ground, our fragility and impermanence. In humanity, we connect; the ordinary connects. This is why using our family videos and narratives drawn from an auto-fiction we’ve written, we aim to narrow the gap between ‘us’ and the ‘other’, the ‘familiar’ and the ‘stranger’ by humanising a life that may seem unfamiliar at first encounter. We do that by showing the ordinariness.

Our father’s death in Vienna was marked by doctors who recognised the fallen angel in the migrant, the dying man and his grieving family. We pay tribute to healthcare professionals who looked after our father in his last days. We say ‘thank you’ to ‘doctors with heart’, especially the palliative care doctors, who remind us of the human face of medicine, the art of medicine, the offspring of Caritas and science.