My Room Is My Best Friend (2007)

Directed by: Berenike Rozgonyi | 48 minutes | documentary

Your family lives elsewhere. You do not speak the language of the country in which you live. You don’t have a job and you don’t know the culture. Who do you tell all your secrets to and who do you feel comfortable with? Your own trusted room! In the documentary ‘My room is my best friend’, Berenike Rozgonyi gives the asylum seekers who are talked about so much in politics and in the media a face and story of their own.

This documentary tells the story of young underage asylum seekers in the Netherlands. Rozgonyi got the idea through a project that is carried out in schools in which young people make a kind of box containing a poem they wrote themselves and decorated with paintings and clippings or photos. The young asylum seekers have also followed this project and in this way the viewer gets a glimpse into their lives. Each individual story is equally moving. The boy who wants to see his brother again but can’t talk about him because of sadness. The girl who wants nothing more than to earn money to be happy and the boy who wants so badly to be a poet.

Berenike Rozgonyi has clearly chosen to paint portraits of real people and she has certainly succeeded. We all know from the media that there are many young asylum seekers and that it is not easy for them. But with this documentary it becomes real and we see how difficult these young people are having. They grow up in a country unknown to them without family or friends. They have to learn a foreign language and get used to a different culture while at the same time trying to process the problems of the past.

Rozgonyi starts off calmly by asking a few short questions of the so-called AMAs in front of a black screen. This is how we get to know them and this is further developed by showing them at school and some even in their home situation. They tell their poem and the thought behind it openly and honestly to the camera. ‘My room is my best friend’ is a small, simple but moving documentary that will touch everyone’s heart. These are real people with real problems and feelings.