re:mote voices

Title: Last Resort
Cast: Dina Korzun, Artyom Strelnikov, Paddy Considine
Director: Paul Pavlikovsky

At just over an hour long Last Resort is a short film, dealing with asylum seekers in Britain. A Russian woman arrives with her son in Britain, expecting to meet her fiancé. At customs officials treat her with suspicion, and with no sign of her fiancé she becomes desperate and asks for asylum.

As a result she is assigned a flat in the town of Stonehaven. Here she is caught in a trap, the absurd paradoxes at the core of the film. Part of which provides a parallel with the film Dirty Pretty Things. As someone being processed by the system the woman can not leave the area she is assigned to and isn't allowed to work to make money.

The process to see if she can stay takes months, and when she decides she has made a mistake and would be better off back home, she is told that it would take months for her request to be allowed to be leave to be processed. The only thing which makes life easier is the friendship she has with a local man. Contrasting the problems, the film is given a sense of redemption from the sense of warmth and the impression of it's genuine nature by this friendship.