Permission to Operate is a story about a single mother struggling to balance different roles in her life, when her passion for a man overshadows the love of her child. It is a film about love and family, about how we try to be genuinely present for each other and about how we fail or succeed in this pursuit.

Permission to Operate

One early morning the Eritrean nurse and human-rights activist Adal Neguse woke up in his home in Stockholm with an uncanny feeling. He listened to the news and heard about a disaster on the Mediterranean. A boat with 369 Eritrean refugees had caught fire and sank outside Lampedusa. Adal knew his brother was waiting for smugglers to bring him over to Europe. He got a strong feeling his brother was onboard this particular boat and went to Lampedusa to look for him. In the film, four survivors tell about the disaster from their individual perspective, they have four separate stories about what happened.