In his debut feature Dutch director Morgan Knibbe rejects conventional tools - talking heads, interviews to camera, factual narration – to present a lyrical essay that describes the plight of refugees seeking access to the European mainland. Instead he tells their story through the eyes and mouth of a ghost, whose human host drowns during the film’s dramatic opening scene.

“When this person falls off the boat at the beginning of the film his reality slips into another dimension, which is a metaphor for the situation in which the refugees are situated,” he explains. “As is the perspective of this ghostlike being, like a spirit flying through a space somewhere between paradise and hell. That is the core concept of the film.”

As a new sense of reality begins to emerge, Knibbe’s camera flies and floats, continually curious, rarely intrusive. Fixed upon a drone it reveals to us an unnamed Mediterranean cityscape before swooping down onto its streets, recording dance parties and mini riots, continuing its journey through windows and along corridors to introduce a panoply of characters seeking refuge, newly settled within Europe’s borders. And when the ghostly narrator isn’t speaking, some of the film’s other subjects take over to explain their plight, always in poetic and whispered tones.

“I am a bird… I want to fly to places I haven’t seen yet,” a very young sleeping girl intones, while a male refugee recalls the tragedy of Lampedusa in 2013, when more than 350 Eritrean refufees were killed off the coast of Sicily. “When the boat sank we swam towards the light,” he contemplates. “It was very far and one of us got tired. He said, ‘Not all of us have to die. You go ahead.’ He said farewell and so we parted.”

“It was important to bond with the people and to make a film not only about them, but together with them, explains,” explains Knibbe. “The only way for the audience to get very intimate with the people in the film was for me to get intimate with them myself.”

The intensely warm tones of the film resulted not from use of filters but from dedicated application during the colour grading process. And the smooth camerawork (using a consumer steadicam and a Sony FS100) was achieved not as a result of years of practice, more through trusting to intuition. “I hadn’t done any camerawork before this film,” Knibbe points out. “The Film Academy didn’t allow me to shoot anything because the concept of the education there is that you really work inside your own discipline. So I actually learned camerawork during the shooting.”

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning was made by Amsterdam-based Baldr Film with a Wildcard grant awarded by the Netherlands Film Fund. The Wildcard initiative enables the most talented and promising Dutch film graduates to go out into the world and shoot an ambitious feature on any subject that takes their fancy.

“Cinema is a very powerful medium and I am always thinking about ways to touch the audience emotionally with cinematic tools but also to make them think about what they are seeing on a meta level, and that is always a difficult balance,” Knibbe underlines. “On the one hand you always want to take your audience on a journey and to tell a story that really sucks them up, but on the other hand you want to make them think about what they are seeing and what their own individual role in the story might be, and I try to do that by creating an audiovisual style that tickles their imagination.”

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning Director: Morgan Knibbe Production: BALDR Film