Help DOVER 82 make an impact!
Dover, Kent, United Kingdom
Aim: Join our impact community and bring our film across the country to spark compassionate conversations about migration
We are Unfinished – a new collective making socially embedded and critical independent films based in the UK.
We are launching our first project, Dover 82 – a short documentary by first-time director and organiser Aria Danaparamita.
2024 was the deadliest year on record so far for people crossing the English Channel to seek safety in the UK.
Honouring the 82 lives lost, Dover 82 takes a poignant artistic lens to reframe an often polarising issue. Shot entirely on a mobile phone, the film aesthetically contemplates how borders inhabit and shape our relationship to place. Archiving the the sites and textures of border architecture on England’s Kent coast, the film breaks through politicised debates in its visually moving portrait that speaks to our senses.
The film is coming out as we are seeing more violent border policies against migrants and refugees. We feel it’s deeply urgent that the film reaches as wide and diverse an audience as possible, and we need your help.
The film was made with zero budget. That means all the labour that has gone into it is done in-kind, as we are passionate about making this urgent film. We would like recuperate the production cost (which was done at the lowest possible cost, including people incredibly volunteering their time and skills).
We are grateful that the film has already been chosen to screen including as part of Amnesty International UK's Refugee Week programme. We would love your support with helping us reach an even wider audience.
With a roughly 5% contingency budget, this rounds to £6,000. If we’re lucky, any further funds raised would go towards our collective’s common pot to fund running costs and future projects.
The film could not have been made without the solidarity and support of many. With your further solidarity, we hope the film can make an impact. Thank you.
More information:
Dover 82 (2025)
5 min, digital, colour
Written and directed by Aria Danaparamita
Produced by Aria Danaparamita and Alfie Johnson
Reviews of Dover 82:
"Dover 82 provides a poignant look into the port town of Dover, a particular English borderland, where in 2024, 82 people died in attempt to cross the English Channel. Providing a sensorial look at how urban infrastructure gives shape to how we understand and experience space, the film asks viewers to inhabit the (in)visible violence of border regimes. A short, poignant film that transforms observation into a meaningful contemplation on space, place, and the politics of crossing.”
— Dr. Lee Douglas, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths University of London
"By inviting us to rest with the architecture and landscape of a border town at centre of a polarised and hostile political debate around asylum seekers in the UK […] Dover 82 asks us as viewers to sit with and investigate what remains invisible and why, as well as pay homage to and make visible those who have lost their life attempting to cross the Channel."
— KONTEKST Film Festival
Your support will go towards:
Production
Pre-production - Research and development: £150
Production - Shoot: £600
Post-production - Editing: £300
Post-production - Sound mixing: £100
Post-production - Colour grading: £100
Transport and per diem: £100
Marketing and distribution
Trailer: £100
Poster design: £100
Copywriting: £200
Digital marketing and distribution: £300
Press kit: £150
DCP: £100
Festivals and community screenings
Our main strategy with this film is to organise community film screenings and conversations, to create an open and caring space for honest and compassionate conversations about migration. In June 2025 we hosted “Do we belong to the sea?” a film screening and conversation at Atlas Cinema in London where we heard from refugees and community groups supporting refugees from Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere.
We would love to programme more screenings and community events across the UK, including bringing the film back to Dover as well as to the north of England, Scotland, Wales and the north of Ireland. (If you’d like to organise something in your local community - please get in touch!)
We would also want the film to reach audiences who may not already be aware of these issues so we would like to submit the film to target festivals.
Community screening and programming: £3,000
Festival submission fees: £400
Thank you so much for your time and attention. If you so wish, we also encourage you to support groups helping people on the move, including:
AlarmPhone UK: a hotline for distress at sea
Solidarity Detainee Support: providing practical solidarity and campaigning for justice for people subject to immigration detention and deportation
Free Ibrahima Bah: a campaign to free a young Senegalese person seeking asylum who has been unjustly imprisoned in the UK
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 31st August 2025 at 11:59pm