Waiting Room (2020)
For years, the delay in processing asylum applications has been a demoralising experience. This short documentary from 2020 follows eight people waiting for the results of their asylum application. How does this wait affect them? How do they maintain their sanity?
By learning Dutch, scrolling through Instagram for hours and making music, the Waiting Room makes sense of the empty days, boredom and endless worrying.
Some lose themselves in the sea of time. Such as Mori, who has been waiting for almost four years. ‘I can move my body, but not my mind,’ she explains.
Waiting times have continued to increase since 2016. In 2019, the average waiting time for processing an asylum application was one and a half years.Despite several warnings by The Dutch Council for Refugees, among others, the situation has now become an inhumane problem. According to the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service, the procedure should generally take a maximum of eight.