
RUNNING TO STAND STILL
Stories about the way the world is.

80 Million
displaced people in the world today (UNHCR)
70.8 Million
annual profits in human trafficking industry (ILO)
$150.6 Billion
$150.6 Billion
over 170,000
migrants, including women and children, have been arrested or detained at the US southern border since March 2021 alone.
55,000
-Persecution
-War
-Famine
-Poverty
-Climate Change
Push Factors
Push Factors
The involuntary displacement of more than 80 million people in all corners of the earth—a number that could increase by at least a third in the next ten years-- is an unfolding tragedy that will, depending on our response, help define what kind of world we share with our fellow human beings in the 21st century, and what kind of global civilization we become.
Much is at stake. At present, thousands of children, women, and men are being forced from their homes every day by armed conflict; violence in many forms; ethnic and religious prejudice; political oppression; poor governance; economic mismanagement; natural disasters; and land, crop and water failures induced by global warming.
Oh Mercy- Searching for Hope in the Promised Land is the first film in the series of documentaries about the epic migration of tens of millions of children, women, and men around the world who have been displaced from their homes by forces beyond their control, and serves as an introductory piece to the series segment on the US/Mexico border crisis. The second film in the series, Running to Stand Still-Childhood Interrupted at the U.S. Borders will address the issues of marginalization, dehumanization, and systematic exclusion, in more depth than Oh Mercy. The film focuses on the thousands and thousands of children and families stuck on the Mexican border, caught in a maze of bureaucracy, uncertainty, and unwieldy application procedures that for all intents and purposes have stopped them dead in their tracks, unless they choose to cross illegally.
The third film in the series will be, Waiting For Home, about the nearly one million Rohingya now living in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, in the largest refugee camp in human history, following their expulsion from Myanmar on August 25, 2017, by the government of Nobel Laureate Aung Soo Kyi. The fourth film planned in the series, Across The Water, is about the ongoing immigration crisis in the Mediterranean, where thousands of displaced people including Syrians, Afghans, and Africans from failed or failing states are seeking asylum on a European continent that is proving as unwelcoming to refugees and asylum seekers as its North American counterpart.

Searching for Hope in the Promised Land

The Unspoken Tragedy of the Rohingya in Cox's Bazar
"...no one leaves home
unless home is the mouth of a shark..."
-Home, Warsan Shire