The Fortress

Around him, landscapes and faces come and go. His route keeps changing course, slowed by the fences, drones, patrols and other surveillance systems that line the way.

The Exile entrusted his story to a volunteer with an NGO supporting migrants at the French-British border. She now passes his story on to us. Between Istanbul, Dakar, Grande-Synthe and Subotica, a shifting geography takes shape: the solidarity found along the routes of exile, and the dead ends met within the fortress the European Union is gradually building.

Director’s Biography

After studying mathematics and traveling for several years, Romain Kosellek co-directed his first report, Courants contraires. In 2014, he joined the Master’s program in documentary filmmaking in Lussas. In 2019, he directed Happy Aphivoât!, and in 2026 he completed his first feature-length documentary, The Fortress.

Director’s Statement

The Fortress is a long journey through the border zones of the European Union.

The film tells the story of one Exile’s journey, revealing the places he passes through and the exiles he meets along the way. His story reaches us through the voice of a volunteer with an NGO working at the French-British border, where she met the Exile and where he told her his story.

The story takes us into all the spaces where exiles are pushed aside and survive between attempts to cross a border. In these moments of waiting, among the brothels and abandoned trains of Thessaloniki, in the squats of Velika Kladuša on the Bosnian-Croatian border, in an abandoned house in Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania, or on the beaches of Melilla, they share their stories: their journeys, the violence they have endured, their strategies for crossing.

As the story unfolds, the walls of Fortress Europe come into view. The Narrator and the Exile are two characters written for this film. Fictional yet realistic, and built from real accounts, they make it possible to weave a narrative that links the stories of exiles to the places they pass through. The documentary footage filmed in the border zones (the exiles encountered, their words, moments of daily life, places of waiting) becomes the imagery of the Exile’s story.