Highlights
- Amnesty International's experiment to highlight refugee crisis in Europe
- Participants are asked to look at each other for four minutes
- The reactions from the particpants are documneted in a video
Can just four minutes of eye contact help people connect better? An experiment conducted by Amnesty International places refugees from Syria and Somalia opposite European citizens from countries like Germany, Poland, Belgium and UK. How they react after looking at each other for four minutes is documented in this video, posted on Facebook on May 25 and watched over two million times so far.
Each pair is seated across from each other with their eyes shut; when they open them, here's what they see - a woman in a hijab sits opposite a woman without one, a little girl sees another little girl opposite her, an elderly bearded gentleman admires the moustache of the man he sees.
So how do they react? With tears and smiles and laughter. They shake hands, they hug, they talk, even though they may not speak the same language.
The moving video holds special relevance in a world that is divided over the refugee crisis in Europe. According to Amnesty International, a million refugees crossed into Europe last year - as it says at the end of the video, just like everyone else, each refugee has a story to tell.
Watch the beautiful video here: