An average British family are getting ready for a trip. Mum and Dad are rounding up their two young children, checking their route online and loading a suitcase into the car. Only this is no holiday; they’re heading to a war zone.

The 2017 BAFTA winner for Best British Short Film employs an ingenious and genuinely shocking device of telling the story of millions of modern-day refugees, but in reverse. For soon this comfortable suburban family are climbing into strangers’ car boots, with parents separated from children, before being smuggled abroad on a ferry. The father is beaten by their traffickers, the mother assaulted. They pick through rubbish and turn to berries on trees for food, getting more and more dirty and dishevelled before finding themselves in the middle of a gun battle. Buildings are on fire, troops are everywhere and bullets fly dangerously close.

Writer-director Daniel Mulloy said he wanted to create a film that was “completely nonsensical and ludicrous” yet “real and devastating”. That’s exactly what he’s done. The scenario feels like some dystopian future or alternate reality, but this is really happening right now, in our world – just not to British people. Home‘s message is that fundamentally we’re all the same and that the ongoing refugee crisis is an humanitarian issue we all need to care about and do something about.

It’s an incredibly clever and powerful piece of filmmaking, with brilliantly understated and natural performances from previous BAFTA winner Jack O’Connell and The Borgias star Holliday Grainger. Released to support World Refugee Day in June 2016, the themes remain all too relevant today.

Home is available to watch along with all the other BAFTA-nominated shorts via Curzon Home Cinema.

Do you have a short film you’d like to be considered for our Short of the Week feature? Get in touch with us at [email protected]

INFORMATION

CAST: Jack O’Connell, Holliday Grainger, Tahliya Lowles, Zaki Ramadani

DIRECTOR: Daniel Mulloy

WRITER: Daniel Mulloy

SYNOPSIS: As thousands of men, women and children attempt to get into Europe, a comfortable English family experience a life-changing journey of their own.