Dr. Isabella Alexander is an award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Film & Media Studies at Emory University. Isabella’s work has long centered on uncovering the social and political realities of our world’s most critical border regions, and she is a leading expert on international human rights, transnational migration, and refugee and asylum law.
For the past three years, she has been working undercover—embedded in hidden brotherhoods, smuggling rings, forest camps, and detention centers across North Africa—to tell a story from the other side of Europe’s unfolding migrant and refugee “crisis.” At this screening, she will give an exclusive look at her forthcoming documentary film, “The Burning,” inviting us inside of her long journey to make it. Her forthcoming book on the same subject, “Burning at Europe’s Borders,” is scheduled for release alongside the film in late 2019. It is her hope that they will work together as creative educational tools, raising awareness in broad audiences and inciting change for the millions of migrants and refugees whose basic human rights are being denied.
At the root of all of her work is her belief that stories have the power to humanize even the most complex socio-political issues, and that humanizing them is the first step in creating positive and sustainable change.
