Through a classroom exercise which assembles recently arrived refugees in a detention centre in Sicily, a teacher gives them – and us – a brutally direct lesson in the realities of refugee politics. The students are real asylum seekers and the teacher is an actor, who alternates between right-wing conservative, humanist, and ‘realpolitik’ approaches as to whether the students can expect to find a new home in Europe or not. One moment he mercilessly rejects the refugees – the next, he embraces them. Operating at the intersection of documentary and fiction, Stranger in Paradise is an unflinching film essay that disassembles our understanding of our world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis.