Aamir is just 13. Like many teenagers, his coming of age is marked by a wispy moustache above his upper lip, a vulnerability in his hunched shoulders, a voice not yet broken.

But after soldiers break into his family home in Mosul and shoot and kill his father, Aamir must become a man. His mother sends him away with a few wads of cash and his father’s watch as insurance, hoping to give him a better life – one he might actually survive. But as the boy tries to find his feet all alone in a foreign world, will he end up losing his mind in the process?

This is a question treated very delicately by director Vika Evdokimenko, whose short Bafta-nominated film, Aamir, is, technically, a work of fiction. But the plot is based largely around events that Evdokimenko and her husband witnessed while volunteering in the Calais migrant camp, dubbed the Jungle, in 2016.

“One day, this 13-year-old Afghan boy with very red eyes approached the build crew, desperate for a door to his shelter, but they didn’t have enough wood – so he threatened them with a box-cutter,” said Evdokimenko.



“He was desperate and embarrassed, but felt this was the only way to show his desperation, to show how vulnerable he felt in a camp surrounded by grown men.”

The door as a metaphor – for new beginnings, closure, safe passage – became the axis around which Evdokimenko developed the film.

Aamir’s emotional and geographical journey, as he is separated from the only life he has known and becomes one of thousands of unaccompanied minors travelling alone through Europe, is a collage of the many lone children Evdokimenko came across while volunteering in the camp throughout 2016.

“By and large they had left home because of conflict or the Taliban or Islamic State, and if they had started with their parents, they had ended up alone, or their parents had sold everything they had to send them away,” said Evdokimenko.

“But most of the children we met we never saw again. It was heartbreaking.”

For Evdokimenko, 32, who fled to the UK from Russia as a child during perestroika, the “despair and squalor” of the refugees’ daily lives was a haunting portrayal of their new world: “It was a tinderbox. There were constant fights, and in one fight in a food queue a refugee was shot, three volunteers were hurt and half the Sudanese camp was burnt down.



“I had a lot of conflicting feelings [being in the camp], because it felt like disaster tourism.

“There was talk of [the government] shutting the camp down, and then they did shut the camp down. But places like this exist all over Europe. You can’t just shut down the global flow of people by shutting down one camp.”

Through interviews with Jungle residents, Evdokimenko and her husband and co-writer Oliver Shuster were able to expose the trauma many of the refugees were suffering: boys and men squashed into car boots, their only air supply being plastic tubes they would suck on for survival. Children separated from their parents, alone and deeply traumatised.



Shot partially in the Jungle – which was home at one point to an estimated 10,000 residents – the 16-minute film is a highly emotive, kaleidoscopic soundscape of trauma, courage and isolation. Filmed by American Honey cinematographer Robbie Ryan, the short encapsulates Aamir’s world: his mother shouting final commands as he is bundled away into a smuggler’s car; the rain and wind flapping relentlessly against the mud and tents at the camp; the foreign chatter of the thousands of other refugees at the Jungle.

Evdokimenko initially hoped to cast someone from the camp to play the lead, but decided it would be unfair to ask them to relive their experiences.

After sitting through numerous auditions back in London, Evdokimenko finally chanced upon Alan Asaad, a first-generation Iraqi Kurd, whose parents had both sought asylum in the UK when they were in their early teens.



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With the family’s guidance, Evdokimenko was able to make the role of Aamir – originally designed to be Afghani – more inclusive of the Kurdish experience, including dialogue and songs central to Aamir’s experience of his life at home and in the Jungle.



Asaad – who used the experience to land him further acting work, including in the ITV crime series Unforgotten – said the role allowed him to understand his own parents’ experience a bit better, something he’d never before had the opportunity to speak about with them.

“They were both my age when they came over [to England] and I know my parents struggled and have been through a lot. They’ve never really spoken about it,” said Asaad.

“It was a harsh reality coming to understand the character and how he gets separated from his mum – and how these kids, who are 13 or 14, are travelling by themselves, just hoping for a better future.”

Aamir, by Vika Evdokimenko, has been nominated for best short film by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts