Originally published in Cineaste Magazine, Winter 2017 issue.
The U.S.-Canadian border has lately become a spectacle on the nightly news as migrants from Trump’s America challenge blizzard conditions and drag suitcases down dirt roads. We rarely see our border on TV, and the scenes of open fields, empty roads, and harsh weather conditions is a new kind of landscape. No longer romantic or mythic, this is a geopolitical gateway through which people from southern climates are willing to risk their lives. The question of borders, migration, and refugees is not only
an urgent topic of contemporary geopolitics, it also represents particular challenges to filmmakers. In their attempts to find appropriate ways of representing the experience of migration, of people fleeing from war, famine, or political oppression, it has pushed many filmmakers into creative experiments with geography and empathetic humanism. The current cycle of migrant films, including small-budget personal works as well as more expensive spectacles such as Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea and Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, provide
important alternatives to the barrage of
images in the mainstream media.
Films about people fleeing intolerable conditions, heading for promised lands of opportunity, have been flooding festival screens for at least the last ten years. As dumentary subjects, displaced people crossing deserts and seas, waiting in nowhere zones for asylum, are significant subjects for filmmakers committed to social justice. Documentarians can put names and faces to migrants, hear their stories, and witness their humiliations; they can recognize the humanitarian helpers along the way, as well as the brutality of those who hold them back. The best of migrant cinema, though, dignifies the migrant through aesthetic techniques of framing, lighting, and portraiture, and is best described as experimental non fiction. Given their homelessness, their fugitive status, and their open-ended journeys, the migrants’ plight lends itself to experimental treatments that challenge the cliches of conventional TV journalism.
