Clearance

Clearance, by director Charles Normsaskul, takes place in a small interview room at a London airport. Mia (Lee) has come all the way from Malaysia ostensibly for a holiday, at least that’s what she’s willing to tell the immigration officer (James). She has been singled out and brought to the interview room presumably because someone thought there was more to her than meets the eye. While there, the immigration officer is patched through on the phone to an interpreter, Khadijah (Rebelle), who is then put on speakerphone to allow the three-way conversation to take place, and so the interview begins.

However, the officer has barely been able to ask his first question before he is called through to another interview room to help deal with another detainee, giving Mia and Khadijah a chance to talk to each other privately. Somehow, Mia recognises Khadijah’s voice, as it turns out they’re from the same village and went to school together. Khadijah sets out very clearly that she is not allowed to speak to Mia while the officer is not there, but Mia persists, pulling on a lot of personal information and using their common history to try and convince Khadijah to help her out.

When the officer finally returns, the conversation becomes more and more protracted, with Mia asking more and more of Khadijah as things move forward, embroiling her in a web of lies which she never asked to be a part of. The officer suspects that more is being said than is being translated and Khadijah’s attempts to cover up the other parts of the conversation, by blaming a bad connection on the line, becomes weaker and weaker every time she tries it.

Throughout the conversation we find that Mia is an unsympathetic character. She finds herself in a difficult situation and becomes a bully and an emotional manipulator to get Khadijah to do what she wants, eventually threatening her and her position if she doesn’t do what’s asked of her. This characterisation shifts the viewer’s perception of the scenario somewhat and now we’re left in our own minds to decide what we think about what’s going on.

This clever moving of the dial by writer Rashdan Radha really lifts the tension the audience feels by being in the small room with the interviewer and interviewee, while Khadijah struggles on the other end of the line to do what she feels to be the right thing. There is suddenly a real dilemma at play, and all preconceptions are thrown out of the window about immigration and legal or non-legal routes into the country, as we are left to come to our own conclusions about the people we have in front of us.

In what is a fifteen-minute chamber piece, the three actors do a great job of relating the backgrounds and pressures of their characters in a short amount of time. There’s not really much for director/DoP Charles Normsaskul to do in such a small space, but he makes sure that we get the right close-ups of the feelings on the character’s faces at the right times, helping us to relate to them and their situations. What really stands out from Clearance, is the writing, which gradually ramps up the tension as we go along without forcing any sort of moral judgement on the whole scenario. In fact, Clearance is quite rare in that it doesn’t try to push a point or tell the viewer what to think, but instead plays on prejudices and preconceived notions and subverts them until we’re forced to confront our own thoughts and feelings on the whole scenario.

The whole point of Clearance seems to be the conversation that you have once you have watched it, whether that conversation is with yourself or with other people. It’s not there to tell you the right and wrong of the situation but instead displays a likely common scenario with multiple strands and considerations, as well as a deeply muddied morality, then allows you to make up your own mind about it all. Even if you can find fault with one character, does that mean that the outcome is fair for all characters? Are you able to side with one and not the other, or does their complicity (forced or otherwise) condemn them both?

Clearance is a clever short film with a real-life dilemma at its heart, and will keep you thinking long after having watched it.