The Terminal

Airports are places we head to in order to leave asap. It doesn’t always work that way. Iranian refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri famously lived in the departure lounge of Charles de Gaulle airport for nearly two decades, a story that loosely inspired both Jonathan Dove’s opera Flight (the latest Vancouver Opera production) and Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal. In Spielberg’s movie, Tom Hanks plays an Eastern European, Victor Navorski, whose arrival at JFK coincides with a coup d’etat in his (ficitonal) homeland that invalidates his passport. Trapped in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land, he adopts the airport as home.

Although reviews in 2004 were mixed, in retrospect The Terminal holds up as one of Spielberg’s warmest, most Capra-esque entertainments. In the years since, US immigration policy and attitudes to refugees in general, have hardened still further. Which makes the movie’s idealistic insistence on common humanity all the more moving.

Introduction by Leslie Dala (conductor, Vancouver Opera) and Ashley Daniel Foot

From Ashley Daniel Foot, Director of Engagement, Vancouver Opera:

What makes Flight and The Terminal so powerful is how they speak to that feeling we all know—that sense of being “in between,” of waiting for something we can’t quite see yet. Both stories invite us to see airports not just as places of transit but as mirrors for our lives. In these waiting rooms, with their hum of announcements and distant echoes of conversation, we see glimpses of ourselves.

A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them; it knows exactly, minutely and in every detail who its hero is and remains absolutely consistent to what he believes and how he behaves.

Roger Ebert

A vision of earthly paradise… improbably and enchantingly, about the romance of being stuck on the ground.

AO Scott, New York Times

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