A photojournalist spends fifteen years on the routes migrants take across Europe's most closely guarded borders, and The Other Half turns that decade and a half of access into a 2022 Greek documentary about the people rarely allowed into frame.
What is The Other Half about?
Built entirely from material gathered over fifteen years, The Other Half follows a working photojournalist as he documents migrant journeys through the dark crossings that mark Europe's edges. Rather than narrating events after the fact, the film moves through places that are ordinarily closed to cameras and to outsiders altogether, letting the people making these crossings carry the story in their own voices and their own pace. The through-line is patience: this is a document built year over year, not a single trip captured and edited into something tidier than the reality it records. What emerges is less a single story than a mosaic of the human boundaries people push when a border is the only thing standing between one life and another, and what it costs a photographer to keep returning to record it.
About the cast
The Other Half is a documentary, so it has no scripted cast; its subjects are the migrants and border communities the camera follows across fifteen years of filming, presented as they were encountered rather than through actors.
Context & significance
Directed by Giorgos Moutafis, a Greek photojournalist whose own fieldwork forms the backbone of the film, The Other Half sits in Greece's long-running documentary tradition of covering the Mediterranean's frontline migration routes, a subject Greek nonfiction filmmakers have returned to repeatedly given the country's position at the edge of the European Union. The film's value lies less in argument than in duration: fifteen years of access most journalists never get, compressed into a single feature.
Watching The Other Half on Ktime
The Other Half streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making a documentary shot largely in unfamiliar languages and settings accessible to Farsi-speaking viewers. The film's page can be read for free by anyone; watching the documentary itself only requires a free K-Time account login, with no charge or trial period involved.