CWC Global: The Burning: The Untold Story of Africa’s Refugee Crisis

The Burning takes audiences across the world’s deadliest migration route: the Mediterranean Sea. A young mother, a brotherhood of orphaned boys, and a father desperate to reunite with his family lead viewers over 9,000 miles to reach a stretch of coast where only eight miles of sea separate Africa from Europe. Over the past decade, the European Union has boldly violated international law to transform neighboring African nations into brutal holding cells for the millions of Africans who are forced to flee their homes every year. With foreign media banned across North Africa, the human costs of the EU’s policies have been hidden from view. Filmed undercover over the course of ten years and across twelve countries, The Burning brings the untold story of Africa’s refugee crisis to light. Filmmaker Isabella Alexander-Nathani joined moderator Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (Global Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of The Burning. This event was presented as part of the UNAFF Traveling Film Festival Santa Barbara. For details about the festival, visit this page. Dr. Isabella Alexander-Nathani is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, educator, and human rights activist. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she combines research and storytelling to humanize complex political issues and reach broad audiences. Her latest book, Burning at Europe’s Borders (Oxford University Press) , and related documentary film The Burning: The Untold Story of Africa’s Refugee Crisis (PBS) , uncover the human sides of our world’s largest refugee crisis. Alexander-Nathani’s work has been featured on BBC, CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera, and she is a regular contributor to SAPIENS. She has held faculty positions at Emory University in Atlanta, Morocco’s national university in Rabat, and UCLA, where she founded a program that brings together students from the School of Law and the School of Theater, Film & Television for courses on Human Rights and Storytelling. Dr. Alexander-Nathani now serves as Founder and Executive Director of Small World Films, a non-profit film production studio that uses the power of storytelling, combined with grounded social science research, to lift the voices of marginalized populations to the global stage and fight for social and political change. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Associate Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees (Stanford University Press, 2024) , which won eight book awards in the fields of global history, migration studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Russian and Eastern European studies. Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is Associate Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and faculty coordinator of the UCSB Migration Initiative. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the UCSB Migration Initiative. Presented as part of the UNAFF Traveling Film Festival Santa Barbara. Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world. The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.