OFFICIAL SELECTION - OUT OF COMPETITION A sharp exploration of the asylum process A confrontation between refugees and the Swiss officials who determine their fate takes center stage in director Lisa Gerig’s sharp exploration of the European asylum process. In The Hearing, Gerig asks four refugees to re-enact their conversations with agents from Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Migration. Each individual recounts the traumatic events which led them to Switzerland, while the agents try to establish whether the bureaucratic criteria for asylum is met. Gerig expertly draws out the tension between the emotional stories of refugees and the allegedly objective metrics for establishing asylum. By underscoring the difficulty of probing traumatic memories for credibility, The Hearing calls into question the asylum process itself. The screening of the film The Hearing will be followed by a debate and a Q&A with the director. The debate will be moderated by Cordula Schnuer editor-in-chief of the Luxembourg Times Lisa Gerig: Born in 1990, Lisa Gerig studied film and editing at the Zurich University of the Arts. She later received a diploma in Documentary Film Directing at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where she won the Promotional Award for Young Students in 2019. With a longstanding interest in the asylum process, Gerig has worked as an activist and a freelance filmmaker for over ten years. The Hearing is her first feature-length documentary.