In 2024, exground filmfest is devoting a special section to showing films about individuals who have been driven to flee. They have been displaced for instance by violence, hunger, persecution or climate change. They can be seen on rubber rafts in the sea, in an old camp or amid demining crews at the border. For some, these are just images. For many, they are realities of life. The eleven long and seven short fiction and documentary films here select, arrange and assemble images, words and sounds, allow the unheard to speak and resurface that which has been buried. At times they are motivating, at others they generate a feeling of powerlessness. The extreme rightward shift in discourse is also a result of the resentment and racism of the “bourgeois centre” and the slogans of the powerful. Migration is not the “mother of all problems”, as a German interior minister once ranted, but the foundation of all societies. And the EU’s migration policy? Tsunami rhetoric, detention pending deportation, dirty deals with autocrats. Where are the (intellectual and political) deminers when you need them?