Originally published at: Man who inspired "The Terminal" died in airport where he lived for 18 years | Boing Boing
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His condition was… not good.
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So sad.
Bureaucracy sucks.
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It seems like a lot of the situation was his own doing. He rejected multiple pretty reasonable solutions multiple times.
This is tangential, but I’ve read a couple of the stories about him, mainly obits at this point, and never saw anything about how he was able to afford to feed himself that whole time.
Maybe when he was there without any option to leave, there were funds for that? But then when he opted to stay?
I don’t get it. Airport food is not cheap.
(And I don’t mean this to come across as heartless. I figure most of us see this as a pretty sad life story, from being ejected from his homeland, to deciding an airport terminal was the best home he could find. But the logistics confuse me.)
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I had read this yesterday on CBC but there was no reason given as to why he was there i.e. travelling etc., an important piece of the story in my estimate and am sad to hear why he was living there again,
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every homeless person has a story
this guy just happened to be famous for it
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Fair point. My first thought was, “but all homeless people haven’t been forcefully turned into non-citizens” but, really they effectively have.
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… they’re all different stories
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I’m missing something.
He lived in the airport until 2006.
Where has he been for the past fourteen years?
I get that he loved the airport, and unfortunately had a heart attack on his latest visit. The article says he’s been in a hospice for a year.
But did the French authorities finally get him an apartment after all his time in limbo?
I think I’m missing the middle bit of his story.
Hope that’s not too morbid, just a bit fascinated with his story.
(his diaries might make for a good book one day)
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… or preferred it to the nursing home anyway
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I think we all are? And he was, too.
As far as I can tell, he spent several years at the airport, from 1988 to “point unclear but some time prior to 2006” due to citizenship and paperwork issues, then opted to stay from “point unclear” to 2006 until he (I think) got placed in a French hospital. Then a shelter.
He went back to the airport in the last few weeks to live.
Then die.
And I still have no idea how he afforded food.
But i find it poignantly sad that, given access to the whole wide country, he felt most safe and at home in an airport terminal.
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He deserves a better movie about his life than The Terminal.
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That’s not how I read it. It took so long for them to get his status figured out, he was habituated to the airport. It’s like he was in prison, then set free; but there was no halfway house, no transition plan, just dumping him out on the street outside CDG with no support. No wonder he went back. That’s all he knew how to cope with.
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According to CBC, he was actually offered refugee status in Belgium and one other European country (that for some reason they don’t name) complete with relocation and shelter services, but he essentially turned it down. He was clearly institutionalized to the airport and turned down many opportunities to leave.
I think this story gets told incorrectly everywhere. It’s told as a story of bureaucracy and a man caught in the system. That’s partly true, sure, but it’s hardly the majority of his adult life. He was a homeless man who happened to be an immigrant and happened to live in an airport. That’s a lot better description, IMHO, and fairer to him and his real struggle.
But people don’t want a story about a homeless man. They want a wacky tale of being caught in an airport terminal for decades because of paperwork because it vaguely mirrors some aspect of the privileged experience of dealing with air travel papers.
He was homeless, so I’m sure he ate the same way other homeless people do- occasional donations and picking trash. A friend of our family (whom we’ve tried to shelter but he refuses) is homeless and points out that developed countries throw out enormous amounts of perfectly good food every day, behind every restaurant and store. Homeless people in these countries have many problems, but hunger is generally not one of them.
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Let me fix that headline for you, s’il vous plaît:
The man who inspired the 1993 French film ‘Tombés du ciel’ (translated as ‘Lost in Transit’), which later was Americanized by Spielberg to make it palatable for US audiences as ‘The Terminal’, died in the Parisian airport where he lived for 18 years.
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Hmm? This translates to “fallen from the sky”.
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They do that a lot with movie titles.
Mar Adentro was “The Sea Inside.”
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La fille de d’Artagnan became Revenge of the Musketeers.
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