On the Bride's Side

In this audacious documentary, the directors—Syrian-Palestinian writer Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, Italian journalist Gabriele Del Grande, and Italian filmmaker Antonio Augugliaro—meet in an apartment in Milan with a group of their friends who have agreed to bring five illegal immigrants from Syria and Palestine across Europe to take refuge in Sweden. But none of the immigrants are carrying proper travel documents, so getting them across multiple borders would seem impossible. Unless, maybe, the four-day journey is set up to look like a cross-continent wedding procession (and who would stop that?). Whether this is a brilliant fraud or a harebrained scheme, the power of On the Bride's Side lies in watching this elaborate hoax come together and subsequently unfold. Along the way, the filmmakers spend a fair amount of time detailing the immigrants' anxiety and presenting their sympathetic stories of escaping war-torn regions. A strange film about the hot-button topic of European immigration, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)