
Surprising Europe - Making ends meet
African migrants living in Europe try to send money home while barely covering their own rent and food, and this film follows several of them as the gap between those two obligations widens. Mobi, Emmanuel, Sylvia, Abu Imaro, and Papy speak directly to camera about the jobs they can get, the ones they can't, and the pressure from relatives back home who assume Europe means easy money. Ugandan reporter Ssuuna works as the on-the-ground guide, tracking people through cramped apartments, informal job sites, and the phone calls where they have to explain, again, why the remittance is smaller this month or missing entirely. The film does not soften the mismatch between the image of migration and its daily accounting: irregular wages, insecure housing, and the social cost of admitting failure to family who cannot see any of it. What comes through is less a single crisis than a routine one, repeated across five lives, where getting by counts as the actual achievement.