Migration Cinema and Europe’s “Unguarded Door”

While migration is typically charted in economic terms and debated politically, the issues surrounding migration are registered culturally. Given that the vast majority of recent refugees enter Europe via the Mediterranean, Italy’s status as Europe’s “unguarded door,” has both altered and intensified long-standing regional divisions within Italy as well as between Italy and the rest of Europe.

This paper examines the cultural reverberations of migration and the national self-redefinition in the Italian context via three films: Cose dell’altro mondo (Things from Another World, 2011), a comic exploration of migration issues that parodies the responses of both the political right and left. Inspired by the 2004 film A Day without a Mexican, this film examines how embedded migrants have become in contemporary culture by imagining their disappearance; Con il sole negli occhi (Sunshine in His Eyes, 2015) a highly sentimentalized story an Italian lawyer who adopts a young Syrian refugee only to surrender her adoptive son to a German couple when she learns that they had adopted his brothers two years previously; and La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, Giuseppe Tornatore 2007), a mystery-thriller that confronts and problematizes the stereotype of the migrant-as-criminal.

In different ways, these three films reveal anxieties about the unsolved yet urgent issue of cultural re-negotiation in Italy as it responds to the migration phenomenon, and to its own inferiority complex as Europe’s internal Other.