“Only death can stop me from going to Europe,” says a young man from Chad midway through his story. The despair and displaced idealism in his voice fill the lives of all the characters we encounter in this film, which lays bare the powerful fiction of Europe as imagined by Africans: paradise in an aging land renewed by the labor of young postcolonial hearts and minds and bodies. Some of the migrants, like Bakary, know the price one pays to live in paradise: 25 percent of what he earns ends up in the hands of the banks that transfer his money to his family in Mali. Visually breathtaking and at times poetic, the film frames its characters’ migratory experiences, their ideas and hopes, as well as those of the families they leave behind.

Pedro Lasch, 2008 Festival