The Backlash
2016 · 13m
Directed by Matthew Cassel
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
As Aboud's family settles into their new life in the Netherlands, the episode documents the rise of anti-immigrant nationalism across Europe.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A documentary about immigrant families and rising nationalism sounds like the most earnest, consensus-approved premise imaginable — and yet Cassel's refusal to sentimentalize or offer easy catharsis is genuinely bracingly bleak in ways that make most 'urgent' social docs look like op-eds.
The restraint here is remarkable: Cassel observes rather than pronounces, allowing the documentary form itself to register the slow, ambient pressure of political change on one family's threshold moment — it sits in the tradition of patient observational cinema while asking what the camera's neutrality actually means.
The genius move is tying the family's intimate adjustment to the broader nationalist surge not through voiceover or montage, but through the accumulation of small domestic moments that grow heavier as the external context shifts — one formal choice that reframes what 'settling in' means.