Close enough to the truth to be painful

People smugglers, coyotes, conductors on the Underground Railroad. Every year, an estimated 1 million refugees, desperate for a better life somewhere else, put themselves in the hands of these covert traffickers. It’s the very serious business of “In This World” to take us along for the border-crossing ride.

With British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom directing a cast of nonprofessionals, “In This World” goes to considerable lengths -- including shooting exclusively on a small digital video camera using available light -- to make one of those journeys, in this case from Pakistan to London, as harrowing and disturbing as the real thing.

That the film succeeds as well as it does -- it won the Golden Bear and several other prizes at Berlin -- is a tribute to the skill of its creators and the strength of its story. It’s also a success that almost doesn’t happen, because the nature of this particular kind of neo-documentary filmmaking raises provocative questions about truth and reality that make “In This World” uncomfortable in ways no one intended.

What was intended by Winterbottom (whose previous films include “Welcome to Sarajevo”) and screenwriter Tony Grisoni was, in Grisoni’s words, “a chance to engage with something that was really going on.”

To that end, two young men were found among Pakistan’s Afghan refugees to star in the film, and the actual smugglers’ routes through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey were researched and then followed by the filmmakers.

Given the inexperience of the performers, Grisoni says, he wrote more of an outline to be improvised from than an actual script. Beyond that, the risk involved in filming in that part of the world was so great that, according to the press material, “insurance was considerably more expensive than it would have been on a standard film -- 10% of the total budget versus the usual 1.5-2%.”

The story starts with Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi), a 16-year-old orphan who lives in Pakistan’s Shamshatoo refugee camp. An older cousin named Enayat (Enayatullah) is about to be sent to London by his family to improve his prospects. Jamal is selected as his traveling companion because he speaks some English. Because both boys are stateless refugees without the passports needed to fly, they will have to go on the dangerous, chaotic overland route.

Even while shooting these preliminary planning stages, Winterbottom and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind are adept at giving us a vivid sense of what this part of the world is like, showing how arrangements are made. Literal stacks of money are deposited with a middleman, to be paid to the couriers only when a phone call from London announces a safe arrival.

The journey, which gradually lengthens into weeks and then months, is not one that can be rushed. As much waiting as movement is involved, with delays exceeding travel time and the barren, desolate topography so unchanging that without the map periodically flashed on screen, it would be difficult to know what country the travelers are in.

What also doesn’t change is the perilous, nerve-wracking nature of the boys ‘ experience. As they are passed from hand to hand, smuggler to smuggler, they’re not only not sure which language it’s safe to speak; they’re not even sure they are connecting with the right people.

Hidden under fruit crates and inside shipping containers, harassed by police as well as by thieves, deceived, exploited and exhausted, the travelers take us along on a journey that is grueling and arduous even when experienced on film.

But in its commitment to re-creating reality and its ability to function as a second skin shadowing every move its protagonists make, the filmmakers run the risk of irritating the audience they want to enthrall.

For, paradoxically, the more the film resembles a documentary, the more we remember that this is not a documentary at all, that if this journey had been a real one, cameras would not have been placed where we find them. What we are seeing may be a representation of the truth, but it is not real, and this collision of artifice and reality is jarring and disconcerting.

This is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. Even if it is counterfeit in a number of ways, the story “In This World” tells finally wins us over because it is too disturbing and well told not to. When things go wrong for the travelers, we feel for them in the pit of the stomach every bit as much as if what happened was real.

What Winterbottom and company have accomplished is so impressive, second-guessing seems beside the point.

*

‘In This World’

MPAA rating: R for brief strong language

Times guidelines: grim adult subject matter

Jamal Udin Torabi...Jamal

Enayatullah...Enayat

Released by Sundance Channel. Director Michael Winterbottom. Producers Andrew Eaton, Anita Overlord. Executive producers Chris Auty, David M. Thompson. Screenplay Tony Grisoni. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind. Editor Peter Christelis. Music Dario Marianelli. Running time: I hour, 30 minutes.

In limited release.