Drowned Before My Very Eyes 

A Planetfilm coproduction with WDR
45 min, 2007

Television premiere at 10 p.m. on Monday, Dec 3, 2007





“I’ve got a piece of advice for all young people: don’t put your lives into the hands of human traffickers. I did, and I paid a high price for it. It’s a long story, and when I tell it I relive all of it once again and it hurts very much,“ says Ualid Nasur.

He comes from Somalia, and his ambition was to be a soccer player. In order to escape war and poverty, he set out, like many others, on an odyssey to Europe. His journey, which lasted many years, ended in Greece, in the path of the propeller of a Coast Guard boat that tore his body apart. In Germany, every six months the authorities proudly announce record lows in applications for asylum from refugees and political asylum seekers, but meanwhile the situation on the border between Greece and Turkey is growing increasingly tense and becoming one of the main sources of income for the local Mafia. Again and again, Turkish policemen open up trucks and see dozens of half-suffocated, half-starving people come tumbling out — people who break their traffickers’ truck windows in a blind range with their bare hands. The Turkish authorities are almost powerless in the face of this situation. There’s simply too much money changing hands.