A Youth • Directed by Giorgio Bosisio • 2020 • Afghanistan

A Youth is a highly touching documentary that tells a story of displacement and assimilation. It follows a young man named Peyman, a fan of rap music and a rapper, who finds himself stuck in Athens while waiting to find asylum in Austria. The director makes use of fast cutting to show the instability, difficulty, and lack of security in the situation in which Peyman and his friends find themselves as they wander through the city. These qualities and the suffocating feeling of unrest all testify to the hardship of living as a refugee, people for whom the concept of home is constantly changing. Besides the poignant subject matter, the film’s visual aesthetics — with an incisive eye for landscape and nature — add new structure to the film, which is subtle in effect.