The New Promised Land

The New Promised Land. Chapter 1. from MiraRuido on Vimeo.

The New Promised land is an interactive real-life documentary animated with a series of motion collages by Joseba Elorsa.

The narrative follows 5 young Syrian refugees on their quest to flee conflict and start safe, new lives. Their story starts in Syria, then the fateful journey across the sea, to moving from camp to camp, not ending in a solid resolution where they are given a home within Germany. Just the fact that this motion collage ends like that shows how for these many families, the reality is they won't get a resolution because no countries are going to take them.

The collages are so creative and well thought out, each still looks like an effective and artistic piece of Graphic Design. There is a vintage film to the whole collage, as if we are encountering old WW2 footage. I feel this aspect makes what she is saying more real and adds gravitas. Many look at the Syrian crisis with a hollow lens, not from a humanitarian perspective, due to how the media is presenting all these people coming into our country as a negative issue, thinking more about how they are going to take our jobs than how they are going to survive. So to create this vintage feel, makes us correlate it to WW2 and therefore we see it for how serious it is, its more real, presenting it more as a humanitarian disaster like WW2 was. This element also makes it seem more scary, maybe this is as a result of how real it is but along with the high pitched ringing in the audio and heartbeat, you feel involved and immersed in the drama she is facing and actually start to be afraid.

There are so many motifs within the visuals of the collage, to reflect and stand as a visual emphasis on what she is saying. There is heavy repetition of mechanics, heard in the audio, how the collage is animated mechanically, and even we see blueprints used in the collage, this all connotes of war. There is also heavy usage of newspaper cuttings, seen in the background to the collage and also the fonts take on a newspaper aesthetic, and the videos are framed as if part of a news article. I think these are used to promote how serious this is as a crisis, like all that she is saying is making the newspaper because of how horrific it is. But this draws a contrast because, no, what she is saying WON'T make the paper. This is happening to too many people that it's impossible to have this all in a news article. I feel it also strikes a chord with us because of the news reports we see on the news about Syria and the crisis that is happening, however we don't see that many of them. There also seems to be repetition of distruction, with the static, the vintage damaged tape, the VHS rewind effect, everything connoting of the destruction in Syria and destruction she is witnessing.

The main thing that gets me though are the last words she says 'A broken leg is not a problem' This is definitely a statement coming from someone who has witnessed so much death and destruction, to consider a broken limb not a problem. You just can't imagine that mindset in our society, playing in the park, break your leg, oh well! I am thankful I am alive. A great place for the video to end on because it rings through you with so much impact.