‘You need to turn your pain into champagne’: A documentary exposes the performance of fairness in immigration systems

The line that stayed with me most from Born to Dance, Forced to Run, Pascale Solages’ moving new documentary, was not spoken on a stage during one of Steeven Labady’s performances. 

It came outside a refugee shelter in Germany.

Labady—a Haitian dancer whose career carries him from Haiti to the Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Germany, the United States, and now Canada—stood before an immigration official with the authority to alter the course of his life. 

Steeven had run into Mr. Smith, an official with the authority to alter the course of his life. After years of navigating temporary legal statuses across multiple countries, he finally had what politicians so often insist migrants should have: a job offer, a place to live, and the opportunity to support himself. Granting his request would not have increased the government’s burden. It would have reduced it.

Mr. Smith confirmed that he had received the required paperwork.

He listened to Labady express the depths of his depression from living in perpetual uncertainty. 

Then he laughed.

“You need to turn your pain into champagne.” 

At first, the sentence sounds almost encouraging. It has the cadence of motivational slogans. Only this wasn’t encouragement. It was cruelty.

Days later, Labady’s transfer request was denied.

It would be easy to make Mr. Smith the villain of the story.

That is precisely the temptation Solages refuses.

The remarkable achievement of Born to Dance, Forced to Run is not that it documents one man’s perseverance. It is that it quietly dismantles our instinct to locate injustice in a single bad actor instead of in the institutions that empower him. The official is not portrayed as extraordinary. He is an ordinary bureaucrat exercising ordinary discretion inside an ordinary immigration system.

That distinction matters.

We often imagine immigration as a system governed by laws. In reality, it is also governed by discretion. Human beings decide how rules are interpreted, which evidence is persuasive, when humanitarian circumstances matter, and whose future is worth another chance.

Most films about migration ask audiences to scrutinize the migrant. Did they follow the rules? Are they deserving? Did they really have to leave home?

Born to Dance, Forced to Run redirects that scrutiny.

Instead of asking whether Steeven has earned belonging, Solages asks us to examine the institutions evaluating him. Did they apply their own rules consistently? Why, when officials had the authority to say yes, did they so often choose no?

She never announces these questions outright.

Instead, the documentary allows the pattern to emerge through accumulation. Scholarships become denied visas. Years of conservatory training in the Dominican Republic end without legal recognition as a student. Refugee camps become endless interviews. Humanitarian protection becomes one temporary status after another. Hope of renewal becomes a removal order. Forced to begin over and over again.

Migration scholars call this permanent temporariness: the condition of remaining lawfully present while never escaping uncertainty.

Steeven’s story gives that idea a human face—one that is overqualified at every turn, yet continually treated as undeserving. 

He qualified for scholarships,  conservatory training, humanitarian protection, and temporary legal status.

The only thing he never seemed to qualify for was permanence.

By the time the credits roll, the question is no longer whether Steeven deserves to stay.

It is whether the institutions judging him deserve the confidence we place in them.

Steeven is the only performer in this film who openly calls himself one.

Everyone else would insist that they are simply doing their jobs.

Governments perform humanitarianism while preserving uncertainty. Politicians perform toughness by turning migrants into symbols at every election cycle. Bureaucrats perform neutrality while exercising extraordinary discretion. Institutions perform fairness while quietly determining whose future remains temporary and whose becomes permanent.

Solages’ most devastating insight is that the greatest performance in Born to Dance, Forced to Run was not Steeven’s choreography.

It was the performance of fairness within the immigration system.

Born to Dance, Forced to Run will have its first public screening on Saturday, July 25, at 6:00 p.m. at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Admission is free.

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