Jennifer Heylen in 'The Best Immigrant' Courtesy of Sony Pictures Television The creators of The Best Immigrant thought they were making science fiction.
The Belgian series, which screens at international television festival Series Mania this week, imagines a near future where a far-right party wins power and passes a law forcing all non-native Belgians to return “to their country of origin.” Quickly adjusting to the new reality, a local TV channel launches a new competition show: The Best Immigrant, in which migrants compete to prove which is the “most worthy” of staying in the country. The winner gets residency. The losers are violently deported.
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Writers Raoul Groothuizen and Christina Poppe came up with the idea back in 2018, after noticing a sharp rise in racist rhetoric among the Flemish far-right. What would happen, they imagined, if a fascist regime took power in Belgium? How far would people, and the media, go to accommodate the new regime?
“We were writing about people with foreign background getting arrested, put into camps,” says Groothuizen. “We imagined it was dystopian fantasy.”
By the time they started shooting the show last year, The Best Immigrant started to resemble a news report.
“In the first episode, we have a scene of police going into a school, dragging teachers into the street, something you see [in the U.S.] right now,” says series director Michael Abay. “Reality caught up with us.”
Even the series most absurd premise — a competition in which immigrants compete for citizenship — feels ripped from the headlines. Last May, Duck Dynasty producer Rob Worsoff pitched a reality show he described as “The Biggest Loser for immigration” to the Department of Homeland Security.
“It really felt like art imitating life,” says Jennifer Heylen, who stars as Mona, one of The Best Immigrant’s unwilling contestants. “What we thought was so extreme, just a few years ago, has become normal. The unacceptable has become acceptable. Five years ago, people would have dismissed [the premise of the show] as impossible. Now they’re not even surprised by the idea.”
For Heylen, the Belgian-born daughter of first-generation immigrants, the story got a bit too closer for comfort.
“I often use my job to escape my regular life. I play a lawyer, I play a princess,” the actress explains. “Here I’m playing a woman of color living in a racist world. I can’t take off that costume when I go home. Jennifer lives in the same world as Muna. I spent three months living in that world at work and then going home to experience it there.”
The Best Immigrant premiered on local streamer Streamz in Belgium in December. It immediately came under attack from the far-right.
“One of the top figures of the far-right really railed against the show, which actually helped, because everyone started talking about it, it become the number one item on the news,” recalls Belgian director Adil El Arbi (Bad Boys: Ride or Die), an executive producer on The Best Immigrant. “The fact he was outraged kind of proved our point. If he didn’t recognise himself, he wouldn’t be so angry.”
As The Best Immigrant rolls out internationally — Sony Pictures Television is handling international sales for the series, which is still looking for a U.S. distributor — El Arbi is interested to see how it will be perceived: As dystopian sci-fi or near-documentary drama.
“These days, reality is so much crazier and so much more controversial [than fiction],” he says, “even dystopia can seem tame by comparison.”
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