Vanessa Redgrave makes directing debut with refugee film

Drawing on her own experience as a wartime evacuee, British actress and campaigner Vanessa Redgrave told AFP her new film about refugees was aimed at ensuring people stay sensitive to the issue. The Oscar-winner made her directing debut on Tuesday with "Sea Sorrow", premiering the film in Hammersmith, an area of west London that has been particularly active in welcoming migrants for years. "I conceived the idea that as a narrator I should narrate what I know," the 79-year-old said in an interview in her home ahead of the premiere, surrounded by family photos and acting awards. The child of actors, Redgrave became a leading actress on both stage and screen and credits her parents with teaching her the importance of a good storyline. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1978 for her role in Second World War drama "Julia" and has been nominated five other times for an Academy Award. Redgrave said her parents took her and her brother from London to stay with a cousin in the countryside during the Second World War, when they also tried to secure visas for Jews fleeing Nazi occupied territories. - Nightmares from Nazi blitz - In the film, she recounts how she watched the city of Coventry burn from a distance after a massive Nazi bombardment in 1940 and suffered nightmares from it years later. Her first experience of helping refugees was after the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 when many fled to London. "I was in drama school. I thought 'I can't go on studying to be an actress with Soviet tanks mowing people down'," she said. As a volunteer she said she "made tea, tried to cook, held hands, listened" to the Hungarian refugees living in squalid homes in Ladbroke Grove in west London. Her new film, which also features actors Emma Thompson and Ralph Fiennes, recounts life for refugees in Europe over the last century and draws parallels between harsh government attitudes towards refugees in Britain in the 1930s and now. The film also hinges on the importance of the post-war Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Redgrave remembers hearing in 1948 for the first time. "I felt a great sense of relief as a child because I thought countries have found a way to stop anything like the Holocaust and the Second World War happening again. "I still remain of that childish view," she said. - 'Keep people human' - Fast forward nearly seven decades and Redgrave said she is incensed by the failure of the British government -- and of Europe as a whole -- to take in more child migrants in recent months. "The shameful thing is that our government, my government, has done everything possible to prevent child refugees from having access to their actual legal rights under international protection law," she said. But she said ordinary British people were as willing to help now as they were to take in Londoners during the Second World War. "The international press seem to have invented a hostility to refugees... People in Britain are very willing to help," she said, although admitting that people can become tired of helping. "What I hope, and I believe that the kind of film I've tried to make is, that it will help keep people human for trying to help." Redgrave filmed "Sea Sorrow" in several countries including France, Greece, Italy and Lebanon, beginning the project after an image of a Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach went viral. Nearly 12,000 people have died or gone missing crossing the Mediterranean Sea since the start of 2014, according to figures from the UN refugee agency. After a peak of more than one million sea arrivals in Europe in 2015, so far this year more than 350,000 people have made the crossing. Redgrave's film ends with Fiennes playing Prospero in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" when he is asked by his daughter Miranda: "How came we ashore?" "By providence divine," he says, before embarking on his story about how they were set adrift on a boat, telling her: "Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow".