In the second episode of “The Journey,” Aboud Shalhoub and his brother Amer set off from Athens for the Macedonian border. Amer had not come to meet Aboud in Greece alone, as expected, but in the company of a young Syrian mother named Fadwa and her two daughters. Fadwa sought to build a life in Sweden, while Amer and Aboud were determined to reach the Netherlands. But in the Balkans, it was best to travel as a group.
About a hundred Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Afghans decided to walk together. With little assurance about the journey ahead, at least there was safety in numbers. Ordinary people—the young, the frail, the weary, the asthmatic, the wounded—prepared themselves to walk across a continent. “Are you going to cross Macedonia with flip-flops?” the filmmaker Matthew Cassel asked a man trudging through the countryside. He replied, “In flip-flops and this bullet that’s still in my leg.”
Trekking across Macedonia, some in the group noticed a dozen men trailing them. “They could be thieves,” Aboud said. The women and children moved to the center of the pack as they walked along the railroad tracks toward Serbia. “Thieves or not, we have to keep moving.”
This week, The New Yorker, in collaboration with Field of Vision, is featuring “The Journey,” which documents Shalhoub’s travels in six episodes.
For more about Aboud Shalhoub's family and the story behind “The Journey,” read an interview with the documentary’s director, Matthew Cassel.
