Exit Belgium
Award-winning interactive investigative story about how Belgium forcibly deports thousands of people each year. Winner of the Belfius Press Prize for Digital Press.
Every year Belgium forcibly puts thousands of foreign nationals on a plane, often with a police escort. How exactly such a repatriation works remained unknown for a long time: the forced return policy was one big black box.
After a legal battle of more than two years, De Standaard received hundreds of anonymized inspection reports from the General Inspectorate. Those reports form the basis of this interactive story. The reader experiences a repatriation from the perspective of the person involved. Do you cooperate or refuse to leave? Depending on your choices, you follow a different path. Three testimonies anchor the numbers in human stories.
The project won the Belfius Press Prize for Digital Press. The jury praised it as a "prime example of how interactive storytelling can make an invisible policy mechanism tangible". (The video footage did not survive the migration to a new site, but the rest of the story is intact.)
- Yves Delepeleire Text
- Tina Boeykens Concept & production
- Andy Stevens Concept & production
- Lennert Broekaert Tech & design
- Julie Wijckmans Tech & design
- Lieven Bulckens Video
- Tom Sonck Infographics
- Wouter Van Driessche Co-Producer