Tania (Anne Coesens) is a Russian national living illegally in Belgium with her 13-year-old son Ivan (Alexandre Golntcharov). When she is arrested by local authorities, Tania finds herself trapped inside a detention centre with Ivan still on the outside. While Belgian immigration works to have her deported, Tania fights to be free.

Illegal was Belgium’s 2010 entry for the Academy Awards, although it failed to be shortlisted for the Best International Film category. It is a shame: writer and director Olivier Masset-Depasse created an emotive and powerful work here, and it deserved as wide an audience as possible. It feels intimate and personal, and is grounded by a sensational lead performance, but it is also highly political and sharply critical of the Belgian government’s treatment of both immigrants and refugees.

Tania’s experiences in detention, and the behaviour that she witnesses, was reportedly based on extensive research of real-life incidents. Scenes of dehumanising procedures are already challenging to watch, before considering the psychological mind games played by immigration officers and guards, the emotional blackmail, acts of physical violence, and even suicide. This is bleak, gravely upsetting material, and while Masset-Depasse treats it with an appropriate and careful delicacy it does make Illegal a sometimes difficult experience.

Anne Coesens is excellent as both a witness to injustice and as a victim of it. As Tania’s experiences develop, Coesens expresses her reactions through a range of emotional states. Paranoia, rage, terror, misery, and hope all rattle back and forth through a quite brittle character. The screenplay successfully expresses Tania’s backstory through its emotional effect on her, rather than simple story elements, and it works superbly.

As a Russian citizen, Tania has no legal option to claim asylum like her Belarusian friend Zina. Once arrested she refuses to give her name, since identification would lead to her immediate deportation back to whatever in Russia frightens her so much. When she is eventually forced to give the authorities some kind of identity, she claims to be Zina – not knowing that Zina had already applied for asylum before in Poland. EU laws being what they are, Tania is then fighting extradition to Poland as well – all the while with her son living on in the outside world. Her experience is a Kafka-esque nightmare, and the stark, handheld manner of the film emphasise both the underlying fears and the immediate menace of Tania’s situation.

Illegal is not simply a furious indictment of Belgium’s treatment of refugees. It is a study of inhumanity in general: countless developed nations have their own inhumane methods of discouraging and minimizing illegal immigration. Here in Australia we have shamefully entertained some of the very worst practices, many of which far exceed what Belgium has done. Seeing Masset-Depasse express a less punitive regime with such shocking and deplorable clarity should make as all consider what is it we have done ourselves.