Exit West

Nadia and Saeed say goodbye to his father and go to meet their contact for the door. The door is located in a former dentist’s office, which is inhabited by what appear to be militants. Despite the unpromising setting, however, the door turns out to be a real passageway. Nadia and Saeed hurtle separately (Nadia going first) through a kind of space time tunnel, at the end of which they find themselves on a beach.

This beach turns out to be Mykonos, Greece, the site of a refugee camp. Nadia and Saeed’s life at the camp is manageable at first. They set up a separate camp of their own and learn how to navigate the community and to barter for goods. However, their life becomes more difficult as they run out of money. Their own relationship is strained in their new surroundings. There are violent men at the edge of the camp who force the migrants into a self-imposed evening curfew. One day, while returning from an attempt to catch fish—for they have also run out of food—Nadia and Saeed are chased by a pair of sinister men; they take shelter beneath an official building but lose their fishing rod in the chase.