‘Between Borders’ Reviews: Middling Religious Refugee Drama Tracks the Case of an Armenian Family Searching for Home

variety.com:

Carlos Aguilar One of the most dehumanizing features — which is certainly a built-in component and not a bug — of the U.S. immigration system as it pertains to asylum seekers is that the applicant bears the burden of proving they have suffered enough or that they risk death in their home country in order to be granted permission to stay.

The more horrifying the survived experiences, the better the chances for a positive outcome. But how does one precisely quantify someone’s distress or the likelihood that their safety will be threatened?

These stipulations exist more to keep people from the developing world out than to offer them protection. The Christian drama “Between Borders” uses a contentious asylum trial as a framing device to tackle the real-life case of the Petrosyan family, an ethnic Armenian couple and their two daughters, for whom Azerbaijan was the only home they’d ever known.

Although tensions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis are longstanding, specifically over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, for most of the 20th century, Russia maintained a semblance of order.