Day 01, On a Train

Hello. Welcome back. Timo and I are on the road again. We just started traveling again last Saturday. No bikes this time around and more weekend trips. Still, same route all the way until Lesvos. Same equipment, just two small cameras. Different issues, same story. And it has been almost three years since our first journey. What has happened since then? What didn’t happen? How did the places and the people that are a part of Refugee Roads since 2016 develop? These are the topics that Timo and I want to explore during the upcoming month.

What happened to the makeshift barbershop in the Calais “jungle”, where Timo got a haircut, after its inhabitants were forcefully removed in 2017? Does the barkeeper from the restaurant Habibi & Hawara in Vienna feel like he settled in (whatever that really means)? We heard our artist friend from Syria who got stuck in Macedonia now plans his own art exhibition in Germany – how did he get there? How did the situation in the transit zone between Hungary and Serbia change? Do refugees arriving to Lesvos experience the same kind of welcome they did in 2015-16? How does their onward movement look like?

Whatever new information we find will also become a part of the final web series, which will be released this summer. In short, it’s time to catch up! We hope this second journey will allow you to reflect on the developments of the past three years – the ever-changing stories that we captured in 2016. In any case, the people behind those stories have not disappeared. And some of them are still waiting for their case to be heard.

We will take you along as best as we can in the next couple of weeks. With the usual blogposts here on our website and with updates on our Facebook page. Please send us questions you have about the project or the current situation on the Balkan Route and we will do our best to look for answers. Thanks to the NRW Film and Media Foundation for making this second journey possible. And thanks to you as a community for still being here.

From the road,

Timo & Florian