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This week Uberto Pasolini will release his new title Machan. The Full Monty producer’s newest film is a fictionalised account of a true story, portraying street life in the slums of Sri Lanka’s Colombo.

So far the film has had an unprecedented response and dubbed one of the most important titles dealing with immigration in recent years. Machan follows a group of men, most of them are unemployed,  all of  desperate to escape their country’s economic and social reality. In a bid to escape, this these men form a phoney national handball team that miraculously manages to blag its way into a tournament played out in Germany. As expected, the team experiences little success in the competition and, after losing all of their matches, vanish into obscurity. What transpires is not only an amusing scam but one of the largest illegal immigration hoaxes of all time.

Urban sprawl in "Waiting for Europe"

Immigration has always been multi-faceted issue, though it has become an increasingly complex one. The need to understand large-scale immigration has been expressed with both fictional and non-fictional filmmaking. Recent years have seen accounts such as the fictional Import/Export by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl that follows the travels of two people crossing borders, struggling to survive, both finding life abroad better than back home in their Ukrainian town. One my favourite non-fictional accounts dealing with the emigration process was director Michael Winterbottom’s docudrama In This World; that chronicled the life-threatening journey of Afghan immigrants to London.

joiningthedocs.tv title Waiting for Europe takes the mass issue of immigration and depicts it from a female point of view. The film follows Vania, a Bulgarian ex – beauty queen who emigrates from her home country to Portugal and then to Spain.This film touches on experiences of isolation and illegality caught up with life’s major decisions: career, love and children. Waiting for Europe displays a totally unique view point of immigration – a women trying to find her identity amidst a changing Europe watch it here.