Roxham: a virtual experience of Canada’s asylum seekers

Roxham is the new virtual reality exhibit on now at Montreal’s Phi Centre, and available on the National Film Board’s website.

Michel Huneault, the creator of Roxham, is a documentary photographer and digital artist.

Just over a year ago, he first took his camera to Roxham Road, the path over the border between Cananda and the United States, in the province of Quebec.

Not quite an hour away from Montreal, asylum seekers are crossing here an effort at a better life in Canada. 2017 was a busy year at the Roxham Road crossing.

“What would it take me to leave everything behind and take the road?”

“People arrive at Roxham under different conditions, sometimes they’re highly prepared, sometimes they don’t know, sometimes they speak the language, sometimes they don’t.” he said in an interview earlier this week.

Huneault returned on 15 occasions to document 180 crossing attempts; of those only three people did not go through with their plans,

And the first one he witnessed, on his fist day, haunts him still.

“She hesitated for a long time, and she cried and she asked for help”

She was a young Nigerian, last February, pregnant and frightened.”I think she was under a certain level of confusion, and so she froze in the ditch after the warning, and she hesitated for a long time, and she cried and she asked for help.”

It was a defining moment for Huneault’s project. An American border agent arrived to help the young woman, so she never did cross, he says.

Michel Huneault has a background in international development, He was in Europe and witnessed the dramatic influx of migrants there.

It is fragments of fabric from photos he took at that time, of tents and blankets given to the asylum seekers arriving in Europe, that he used to shield the identities of the asylum seekers crossing here.

Huneault talks about the confusion of overlapping jurisdictions, where RCMP officers, under Canada’s national laws, are protecting the border, but under international law, asylum seekers are allowed to cross.

He says witnessing the shift was surprising. One moment the officer is shouting a warning, then following the crossing, receiving the asylum seeker with a gentler, more supportive tone.

Huneault hopes the project will help heighten the level of engagement Canadians have with the issues around the global migrant crisis.

“We’re just asking people to come with us to Roxham and stand there and listen, and look at what you’re seeing?”

He says to witness these dramatic moments will naturally raise questions in the minds of the viewers, about the policies and the laws.

“It’s inevitable” he says. You have to ask yourself, “What would it take me to leave everything behind and take the road to come here at Roxham?”