‘The Green Eyes’ Locarno Review: A Tender Fable of Migration, Trauma and the Power of Imagination

Among the many issues and stories that have emerged around migration from the Global South to Europe, one of the most unusual is a psychosomatic condition known as “resignation syndrome.” First identified in Sweden a few decades ago, it affects children and teenagers from refugee families who spend years in legal limbo, unsure whether they will be allowed to stay or forced to return to the countries they fled. Many of them fall into a deep, coma-like sleep that can last for months, even years, and from which it is extremely difficult to wake them.

The causes and motivations behind this phenomenon have been widely debated. Some skeptics dismiss it as a strategy to pressure authorities into granting asylum to affected families. Most specialists, however, agree that it is a serious and genuine condition, triggered by extreme trauma. The Green Eyes builds a fictional story around such a case, relocating it to France. Compact, straightforward and broadly accessible, the film from Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh (Gagarin), follows an Iraqi immigrant family living in the Landes region, navigating the fraught process of integration.

Things take a turn for the worst when the family—composed of a widowed father (Omar Al Jbaai) and his two children, the teenage Nour (Sayyid El Alami) and eleven-year-old Chaya (Douae Butarbuch M’Zaouki)—learns that their asylum request has been denied and that they have one month to leave the country. The father immediately leaves for Spain in search of work and legal alternatives, leaving the children on their own. Matters grow even more dire when Nour falls into a deep sleep, and young Chaya is left to figure out how to bring him back.

Les yeux verts centers on Chaya’s determined—and increasingly unusual—efforts to awaken her brother, efforts that push her toward decisions that are both strange and radical, while authorities struggle to address the situation from their end. Gradually, and sparked by one of Chaya’s key choices, the film shifts from social drama toward a strain of magical realism infused with spirituality. While this turn carries a certain poetic appeal, it also softens the film’s intensity and political edge, steering it closer to the kind of accessible family drama that might comfortably fit in sections like Berlinale’s Generation.

Still, the film manages to approach a pressing, widely reported issue from a relatively fresh angle. By placing a warm, tender, and disarmingly likable child at its center, the directors attempt to universalize the conflict, making it legible even to viewers who might otherwise be resistant to such themes. And while magic and fantasy are not always what resolve the political crises that define our world, there is something to be said for believing in the power of dreams and imagination. You never quite know where a solution might emerge.