There is a scene towards the end of Ousmane Zoromé Samassekou’s film The Last Shelter (2021) in which its central figure, Esther, a sixteen-year-old from Burkina Faso, bows her head and announces her decision to leave the House of Migrants in Gao, the Malian city where so many routes in and out of the desert meet, and make her way across the Sahara as she had originally intended. ‘I have changed my mind. I want to go to Algeria.’ Esther does not raise her gaze, kneading her red and white knitted jumper between her fingers, her legs crossed on the mattress on the floor.

To whom she is speaking we aren’t sure, but her demeanour, her steeled eyes fixed on her lap, lends her monologue the feeling of a confession. She speaks slowly and without interruption, and emotions that have barely been contained throughout this eighty-five-minute film, Samassekou’s second feature-length picture, which this year won the top prize at the Danish international documentary film festival CPH:DOX, suddenly surface. ‘I just want to be free. To be free, I decided to go to Algeria. Because I know that if I stay here, I’ll be stuck or go back to Burkina. When I was a child, I didn’t love life.’ Esther explains that she was abandoned by her mother. ‘She left me when I was two. It’s too young.’ She grew up with her mother’s friend, who recently died, and on the day of her funeral, she was banished by her sisters as this surrogate figure was lowered into the earth. She stood there ‘like a statue,’ and then fled.

Now, she says, ‘Going back to Burkina is impossible—even countries that border Burkina. I don’t want to smell that air again. I want to go forward, free myself from the past and all that’s been said about me. Be proud of myself. Being angry blinded me. I wanted to kill myself, I told you that I hated life.’ You see the tension rising in her left cheek. She says she didn’t want to say that, but she did. ‘But since I arrived here, I understood that you should love life and life will love you back. I never thought that I could speak freely to someone. I always kept my secrets. But ever since I expressed myself, everything has been going well.’

The Last Shelter does not sugarcoat what it means to become a migrant. Even so, through the fragments of life it depicts, the film shows that these harrowing journeys can be a source of hope for those who undertake them. In particular, the film focuses on the friendship between Esther, who is intense and spirited, somehow restive, and Khady, whose younger and more open spirit mollifies her. Long shots track Khady flicking through her phone to select the best picture of her posing. Esther, who we later see wearing a yellow Arsenal shirt, has three dreams: to make music, to act, and to be a boxer. Scenes of their nascent bond with an older woman, Natasha, who has lived there for five years and has forgotten the story of her life—she cannot remember whether she has a family, and seems to be in the grip of some kind of obliterating amnesia—make up the submerged structure of the film, especially in shots that record a developing intimacy between Natasha and Esther as some sort of kindred foundlings.

Showing as part of the recent festival Frames of Representation which ran at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London from the 25 November to 4 December, with its semi-documentary focus on ‘cinema of the real,’ Samassekou’s film uses footage shot over a two-year period, time in which he, as director and cameraman, periodically lived in the Caritas House of Migrants, whether for three weeks or five months at a stretch, and developed a closeness with his subjects that is everywhere apparent in the film. It is, we realise, from Samassekou himself that Esther retracts her promise and explains her change of heart—she implores him not to counsel her against her journey but to let her go. ‘To fulfil my life now,’ she says, ‘this is the path I have chosen.’

The film opens with a group of men digging graves. The people being buried in this patch of the Sahel didn’t make it—their names and their country of birth are painted in white on iron boards set into the corrosive sand. ‘The rust eats away everything,’ one of them says. Samassekou, in the Q&A at the ICA, said he hoped that the film would be helpful in demystifying what migration towards Europe has been made to mean for people born in this part of the world—often, he says, those who make it hide what they’ve endured, and the kind of life that awaits them. The man who runs the Gao waystation, a kind, protective figure, warns Esther vehemently against making this journey, and implores her to give him a number—any number—from home so that he can inform them of her whereabouts, both for now and in case she doesn’t make it. ‘What will you do in Algeria, Esther?’ he asks. ‘You will face armed forces. You will be sexually abused.’

Amid its slow, discomfiting realism, there is an unremitting beauty to the film noted by all the audience members who asked questions at the ICA. That quality comes not so much from romanticising the harsh look of the open desert but in the film’s cinematic patience, a willingness to be with some of this brutality over time. The Last Shelter’s opening shot is a bare tree in the middle of an ochre desert with the arms of a coat—is it an animal hide?—caught in its spindles, whipped by the wind. We come back again and again to these melancholy sandscapes, a restless expanse of seemingly limitless proportions.

The Caritas house’s yellowing blue becomes a motif of endless waiting. The colour of limbo, it is also the promise of the freedom attends it—the colour of Natasha, caught in a state of suspended animation, for whom the refuge is a makeshift though not a temporary home. Samassekou made this film to understand better the departure of his uncle Amadou, who left for France thirty-two years ago and has never been heard from since. ‘We do not know if he is alive or dead,’ Samassekou has said. He navigates the complex ethical terrain of lending poetry to a situation of systemic violence without comment, as if to say: beauty belongs to all.

At the end of the film, we glean from big white letters embossed on a black background that Esther made it to Algeria, while Khady has returned to Burkina Faso. We know no more than this. Such is the nature of documentary filmmaking: life goes on, that journey continues to be made, the blue house in the middle of the desert carries on being a refuge for those who make this perilous route, and the camera must stop somewhere. Against the routine presentation of migrants not as people but as flows, waves, floods, and streams, this humane film does something that should not need doing—it documents the lives of those travelling, it records their attachments, hopes and dreams, and it does so with tenderness and precision.