“Wherever you go there you are,” a phrase popularized by Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction founder John Kabat Zin to describe how leaving a traumatic situation doesn’t mean the trauma has left you. For war refugees, despite leaving the physical site of destruction, the aftershocks seem to reverberate inside of them for years to come.
Netflix’s latest short documentary film Camp Courage shines a light on war refugees’ resilient capacity for connection and care in the face of those trauma aftershocks. Directed and produced by Max Lowe, Camp Courage tells the story of a pair of Ukrainian refugees at an outdoors-healing summer camp in the Austrian Alps. The film follows ten-year-old Milana, and her grandmother Olga on their individual and intertwining journeys through the challenges the camp presents to each of them. Milana is faced with scaling tall mountains, and Olga is confronted with parenting a preteen who lost her mom. Each of them must lean on the support of community and ultimately each other to reach their respective goals.
At the beginning of the film, the audience is invited into Milana and Olga’s journey preparing for and traveling to the camp. On the bus, Milana exclaims how beautiful the mountains look and her desire to climb them. However, in the coming days at camp, each time Milana and the group arrive at the climbing site, Milana finds herself unable to climb. In the end, Milana braves the steepest mountain yet, hand in hand with an instructor, and in community with the other children, one step at a time.
Throughout, the film cuts back and forth between present light-filled shots of Milana and Olga at camp, and past dark news clips of the war. This contrast of light and dark represents the refugee’s ability to allow for the coexistence of pockets of joy alongside trauma.
It isn’t until a quarter of the way through the documentary that we learn that Milana has a prosthetic leg, which she acquired after being injured in a bombing as a toddler. The filmmakers don’t objectify Milana’s disability for the inspiration of a nondisabled audience. Instead, Milana’s prosthetic is simply portrayed as part of her life. The aspect of Milana the film portrays as inspiring is her ability to overcome her portrayed fear of climbing, not her physical disability.
As a viewer, I wish we could have heard more directly from Milana. For example, when Milana resists climbing, is that due to fear stemming from trauma or from the pain she mentioned due to a misfitting prosthetic? It’s important to acknowledge that what comes across as fear of climbing may not actually have anything to do with fear but instead, it may be her way of expressing pain.
Although the film emphasized Milana’s resilience in her ability to overcome her emotional fear of climbing, Milana’s resilience also could be interpreted as her capacity to love and trust in the face of great loss. Lowe captures this love beautifully through light-filled shots of Milana holding flowers she wishes to give to her grandma, or Milana holding hands with the instructor as she climbs.
