When asked in July 2015 about migrants trying to reach Britain through Calais, former British Prime Minister David Cameron described a ‘swarm of people crossing the Mediterranean in search of a better life’. These words, condemned by his opponents who saw them as dehumanizing language, reflect the content of the campaign that led to Brexit. They are imbued with images that colour the Western imagination of migration.

This film questions these images by showing the collective unconscious of maritime migration. Borrowing from visual anthropology it does not only consider man as apolitical animal, but as a homo pictor: a being who shapes images, who produces images and who understands the world in images.