Walid (17) has fled from Syria to the Arctic Circle. As his family is stuck in the Balkans, on the border of the EU, Walid has to help them cross it, over the phone, from the streets of a northern Norwegian fishing village.

Mobile is a deep and passionate film that hold a great deal of heartfelt tension. Director Truls Krane Meby, who’s previously shared memorable films like World Wide Woven Bodies and Good Machine Gun Sound, brings us an unexpected perspective of a young Syrian man dealing helplessly with his family’s escape from Syria. All he has is his mobile phone. The film is based on a true story, where the first spark came from hearing about an incident. A young Syrian refugee had helped his fleeing family cross from one country to the next.  All he had was a mobile phone to deal with everything, remotely from Svolvær in arctic Norway

It immediately sounded to me like the incident had the potential to become a film that could encapsulate many elements of the refugee experience, in a direct and very human way. The mobile-phone aspect interested me, as I’ve dealt with our relationship to techonology in previous films. I thought it could become an emotional film about our current times (in fact the story was so contemporary that by the time we’d shot it, it was placed firmly in the past, as the specific route the family travels in the film was locked down by then).

I got in contact with the young man and we talked extensively about his experiences. He gave his blessing for me to dramatize them.

Citation from Vimeo’s Staff Pick Premiere

Mobile is a wrenching subject which grasps as much from the silence and isolation to really create the heavy tone. Likewise, a theme that fall in line with one of this year’s Oscar nominees ‘Brotherhood‘. Truls is currently working on a new feature length film call Animals &, or Dyr & Dyr as a working title. In addition, you can watch the trailer.