Representation of Refugees in European Cinema

This paper explores the representation of refugees in contemporary European cinema, including films produced in Europe by non-European directors. The filmic visibility of refugees, similar to mass media representations, is frequently inflected by concerns of humanitarian crises. Refugees are portrayed as the victims of human trafficking in border spaces or of exploitation as undocumented workers in the destination countries. Films on refugees in Europe often use tropes of suffocation and voicelessness. Such tropes of suffocation and voicelessness in refugee films have parallels with the contemporary regime of asylum in Europe. Anthropologist Didier Fassin, in his work on the post-1990s treatment of refugees in France argues that while in the 1970’s a refugee’s narrative of trauma was taken into account as evidence in courts for asylum applications, currently the evidence of abuse has to be corporeal. The asylum-applicant refugee needs to show a wound to make his pain believable. The wound is proof of how full life with social value turns into bare life with no value other than its mere existence. This paper suggests that victimized refugee bodies in films similarly attempt to show bodily wound to appeal for the humanitarian consciousness of their spectators. Such appeal to humanitarianism through the tropes of suffocation, voicelessness and wounds and challenges on the refugee bodies will be analyzed in films such as Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), Damjan Kozole’s Spare Parts (2003), and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010), Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), and Phillip Lioret’s Welcome (2009).