Meanwhile his brother has gone back to Syria – or never left in the first place – to fight Assad.
But his mum and dad are still in Turkey while Omar took the gamble on moving onward to try for residency in the UK. Most dramatically there is Omar – a hugely gentle and intelligent performance from Amir El-Masry – who has left Syria with his family. The situation is taken broadly from real life. And as the narrator says at the beginning of Casablanca: they wait … and wait … and wait. Forbidden to do any paid work, they must simply wait for the official word on whether they can stay. Here a number of refugees from Syria and elsewhere – single men with no families – have been relocated in grimly functional hostels with a bare-minimum subsistence allowance. The setting is an impossibly bleak and starkly beautiful Scottish island, fictional and mostly deserted, almost resembling a stage-set for Waiting For Godot (but filmed partly on Uist in the Outer Hebrides). It reminded me at various moments of Aki Kaurismäki or Elia Suleiman or Bill Forsyth, with a distinct touch of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail And I. Limbo is about refugees and asylum seekers in Britain, and it’s a bracingly internationalist and non-parochial piece of work: film-making with a bold view on the world but also as gentle and intimate as a much-loved sitcom.
Despite an elegant deadpan style established from the outset, Sharrock soon gets you to invest in the characters and care deeply about what happens to them. W hat a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping.
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