Home

According to the UNHRC there are around 550,000 refugees currently having claimed asylum in the UK, with a further 75,000 applications, relating to around 100,000 individuals, looking to get processed in the year up to March 2026. These numbers equate to less than 1% of the population of the UK being made up of refugees, with around half of these being made up of Ukrainians escaping war, as well as Hong Kong and Afghan nationals escaping persecution, who have been welcomed using resettlement schemes.

These numbers are beginning to fall, mainly because most of the Ukrainians and Hong Kongers have already been relocated, but the numbers of small boat crossings in the English Channel is also down. The government would have you believe that this is all down to their hard work and determination to ‘control our borders’, but by March 2026 around 42% of all asylum seekers since 2018 had arrived by small boat. It is easy to see that numbers like these, year on year, are still unsustainable, but it is important to see that the real numbers are a far cry from what certain hard-right nationalists would have you believe.

Angry little ‘nationalists’ like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who likes to call himself ‘Tommy Robinson’ as an homage to a prominent, violent football hooligan(!), want to tell you that every problem in society is created by the incoming wave of refugees to the country, jumping on any news story that involves asylum seekers and then painting everything they do in a dark light. The ignorant and supercilious Elon Musk also likes to get in on the act, through his hate-speech machine and personal megaphone platform, X, continually wading in on issues that have got nothing to do with him and which he knows absolutely nothing about, just to stir up hatred and unease, because a confused and angry electorate is easier to control when you’re working for some of the biggest warmongers in the world. It would be better not to even talk about the leader of Reform UK, so let’s not.

Instead, let’s look at writer/director, Lorenzo Harani’s new short film, Home, which actually lets us look at the people who are being talked about as mere statistics. In four short minutes we are invited to speak with just some of the people who have sought asylum in the UK and who are being helped by the London charity, Compass Collective. Through their words, and the voice of one of their members (Shah), we can directly hear their pleas to just wake up in a place where they don’t fear for their lives. The loss and pain are etched deeply onto each of their faces as we are introduced to them in turn, and they tell us what they hope for in a new place, in a new world, in a place they one day would like to call home.

Much like what Ken Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty knew when they made The Old Oak (2023), Harani knows that you can’t talk about these people until you start to talk about them as people. Having spent time at the Compass Collective, talking to and getting to know the refugees that are shown in his film, Harani understands that things are not as black-and-white as they are made out to be in short news bulletins, or on dubious, unsubstantiated, unregulated websites. He has taken the time to hear their stories and really see the people underneath, and so has turned to us, to highlight their stories and show us the faces of those we would condemn, to see if we can see the humanity in ourselves as we look at them.

Sadly, there’s not an awful lot of time to spend with each of the refugees in the film, and we only get one voice speaking for all the others, in a short four-minutes that only scratches the surface of what the lives of these asylum seekers is like. There are a few artistic shots interspersed amongst the talking heads, of crashing waves and flocks of birds in flight and such, but not much more that would help constitute Home as a film rather than an infomercial. While Harani’s heart is in the right place and his intentions are pure, with Home we are left at a bit of a loss as to the nuances of becoming a refugee, of choosing the UK as the country of destination, and of what these people would like to do as a working, tax-paying citizen.

With all of the civil unrest that has exploded in the last few days and weeks in the UK, with alleged rapes of many young girls by asylum seekers, and the turning of whole communities in Glasgow against individuals who they ‘think’ might be involved, as well as marches and protests and the ever-present hotel room housing debate, it is important that people are faced with the facts before being asked to make up their minds about how we help those who have come to us in their time of need. While Home tries to at least put a face to the people at the sharp end of the statistics, it is very limited in the facts it portrays, and instead, in giving its subjects a voice and a platform for their hopes and their opinions, may end up having the opposite effect than the one hoped for by the filmmakers, as certain hardliners will only hear more people saying that they want to come to the UK to live a good life, to take the jobs that are here, and to be a part of the state system.

However, maybe that is the point. Perhaps we should all take four-minutes out of our day to watch Home, to gauge our reactions to what we see and hear, and find out just what kind of a person we are by how we respond to desperate people asking for human dignity and a safe place to live their lives.