How long does a day last when you don't know how long you will have to wait?
We are in a refugees camp near Thessaloniki. A place without time, where people with different pasts share the same suspended present.
Killing Time is a film about the relationship human beings-time told through the experience of five refugees living in the camp for a period of a year and a half.
Realized with the support of Piemonte Doc Film Fund.
With this film we wanted to tell about the time suspension that emigrants experience in the refugee camp. We shot in Greece, near Thessaloniki, but there’s a similar situation in many other places, as we verified visiting different camps.
Refugees wait for years to have an answer to their asylum application, living in total stagnation, with the impossibility to build any present or future for themselves and their family.
The intention of Killing Time is to invite the audience to share this time and space.
The protagonists welcomed us in their tents and in theirs intimacy, without filters. This was possible after spending a long period in close contact with these people, through the voluntary work Valeria Testagrossa did in the camp, an experience that aroused her need to tell this story. Getting to know the residents in the camp, we realized we wanted to describe the sense of “empty time” they live in.
Human experience of living in these places seemed an issue that’s not raised often enough by television or press, and we thought a movie would have been a powerful way to tell it.
