Marieke van der Velden & Philip Brink

Every summer many European tourists travel to the Greek island Lesbos for a sunny holiday. This year thousands of refugees crossed the sea from Turkey and arrived on the island as well, looking for a safe haven in the European Union. Filmmakers Philip Brink and Marieke van der Velden invited tourists and refugees to talk one another about life while sitting on a little bench overlooking the sea. The result is a short documentary with conversations of war, fleeing, home, work, love, but also cars and pets. It's an ode to humanism and shows what happens when we take time to sit down and talk with each other in stead of about each other: The Island of All Together.

Philip Brink (art director) and Marieke van der Velden (photographer) are a couple from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Along with their commercial assignments for companies and NGO's, each year they do a project of their own together.

In these projects they try, without being in denial of the daily news, to add a nuance to the enormous amount of extreme news reports people are presented with on a daily basis.

Previous projects brought them to Afghanistan where they asked the residents of Kabul about their favourite place in the city (A Monday in Kabul).

In Lebanon they asked personal questions to Syrian refugees on behalf of theirFacebook friends (Outside Syria).