The great winner in the last edition of the Oscars – not surprisingly – was the extravagant All at once everywhere. A multiverse and multigenre film —literally, according to Filmaffinity “Comedy, Action, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Family, Martial Arts and Time Travel”—. It stars Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat who discovers that every little decision made throughout life creates a universe that branches out. Endless alternate universes for her to save from the clutches of the villainous Jobu Tupaki as she tries to keep her marriage afloat, her relationship with her daughter, and do well on an IRS inspection.
This interdimensional madness took 7 statuettes, including the most valued: best film, direction, actress and supporting actor. The latter, Ke Huy Quan, for his role as Waymond, Evelyn’s candid husband. Quan, whom we all knew as a child when Spielberg chose him to accompany Indiana Jones in the temple of doom in the endearing role of Stopper. The Goonies would arrive immediately and then, as so many other times… the oblivion of Hollywood. Moved, Oscar in hand, he said: «My journey began on a ship. I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow… ended up here. They say stories like these only happen in movies.”
Because Quan, at just 8 years old, was one of the more than a million so-called boat people who fled the war and destruction of South Vietnam in the 1970s. Many did not survive the trip, dehydrated, drowned or hands of the pirates Others, like Quan’s family, ended up in refugee camps like Malaysia’s Pulau Bidong, said to be the most densely populated place on the planet with 40,000 people crammed into an area little larger than a football field. .
While, at the same time, elsewhere, the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak — whose parents were of Punjabi Indian descent who were among the hundreds of thousands who immigrated to Kenya and Tanzania in the 1930s and to the UK in the 1960s — , uses the slogan Stop the boats (Stop the boats), announcing the immediate deportation of anyone who arrives in the country illegally. Home Secretary Suella Braverman — of immigrant parents from Kenya and Mauritius — presented the bill as “robust and novel.” Refugees and applicants without “a safe country” to return to will be sent to Rwanda. This “First global association to face the migration crisis” that the outlaw Boris Johnson accompanied by 120 million pounds as a payment to Rwanda that would be expanded as refugees arrive.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has published a statement in which it is “deeply concerned” by this clear violation of the Refugee Convention, which explicitly recognizes that refugees may be forced to enter a country of asylum irregularly. .
While, at the same time, elsewhere, on the very weekend of the Oscars, inhumanity met at a Karaoke where the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini, sang just a The day after Meloni organized a council of ministers in Cutro, the small town where a barge with nearly 200 migrants sank last February, mostly from Afghanistan, a country suffering one of the worst humanitarian crises after the return of the Taliban to power. Meloni —which the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating if there was an omission of relief when the coast guard did not come to the rescue alleging inclement weather— and Salvini —tried for kidnapping and denial of official documents for the blockade of 147 migrants in the Open Arms Case in 2019 when he was Minister of the Interior—chose to passionately interpret La canzone di Marinella, which tells the story of an emigrant from Calabria who drowned.
And while, at the same time, elsewhere, on the stage of the Academy Awards, another miracle: Halle Berry presented Michelle Yeoh with the Oscar for best actress. The first black woman to win the award presented it to the first Asian woman. Despite the 95 editions of the Award. Yeoh greeted him saying, “To all the boys and girls who look like me, this is a beacon of hope and possibility.”
Possibilities… How not to believe in multiverses! That somewhere chance places us on a ship fleeing; Before Vietnam, now Afghanistan. And that in a parallel universe we are that actor who succeeds or that emigrant politician who closes the door behind himself, or who opens it offering the opportunity to achieve glory or… a life.
As Waymond tells Evelyn in the film, “You underestimate the power of one small decision to make a difference over a lifetime.”
@otropostdata
