Me, We (2021)

The film follows four different people and explores their attitudes toward flight, migration, and asylum against the backdrop of the refugee crisis. Marie is a young volunteer who travels to Lesbos to help on the ground and provide initial assistance to refugees arriving at an NGO camp on the coast. However, no one has arrived for weeks. So she joins an NGO ship, which is soon stripped of its flag, making further rescue operations impossible. One night, thinking she sees a ship in distress on the horizon, she takes matters into her own hands, against her supervisors’ instructions and the law, and ends up shipwrecked herself. Marcel tries to put his own vision of protecting Austria into practice with his group of rowdy young men. They see immigration as a threat to their homeland and organize escorts for women, fearing harassment by migrants. Riding their souped-up mopeds, they travel around promoting their organization. Television editor Petra takes in Mohammed, an unaccompanied minor refugee, and wants to integrate him into Austria as well as possible. In doing so, she fails to see that this also means respecting personal boundaries. She imposes her own ideas on Mohammed and gives him little room for his own. Mohammed eventually reveals to her that he is neither a minor nor from Syria; he only claimed to be so to improve his chances of receiving asylum. Gerald runs an asylum shelter in Vienna that is threatened with closure following complaints from local residents about the residents’ behavior, should there be any further problems. Gerald values treating those in his care with compassion, but the young, traumatized asylum seeker Aba repeatedly provokes him. Gerald’s helplessness increasingly turns into aggression.