Man burnt alive, refugees let down: New film returns focus to migrant camps

Tomáš Rafa's first full-length documentary, Refugees Are Welcome Here, will premiere online.

Refugees and migrants waiting for a bus at the port of Piraeus near Athens on May 4, 2020. Refugees and migrants waiting for a bus at the port of Piraeus near Athens on May 4, 2020. (Source: TASR/AP/Petros Giannakouris)

For more than ten years, Tomáš Rafa has been mapping the issues of extremism, nationalism and xenophobia with his camera.

He films protests by extreme right-wingers against Roma, migrants and the LGBT community - in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and other countries. The Slovak documentary maker then uploads them onto his YouTube channel, where more than 17 million people have already seen them.

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When the first segregation wall in the modern history of Slovakia was built in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, back in 2009, Rafa was a student at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica.

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“It was officially called the Sports Wall and was intended for sports activities,” he said. “In reality, it separated a Roma settlement from a block of flats called the East.”

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