This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees. Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like ‘Europe’ and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a ‘transborder’ consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the ‘migrant to Europe’ figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner). Bringing together 16 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in Film and Media Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Migration/Mobility Studies, Cultural Studies, and Aesthetics.

This collection brings together international experts on the cinema of migration and diaspora in postcolonial and postnational Europe. It offers a comprehensive theoretical and analytical discussion of a highly productive creative sector and documents the spectrum of this area of exploration in European, transnational and World Cinema studies.

Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality puts gender at the centre of cinematic representations of contemporary transnational Italian identities. It offers an intersectional feminist analysis of the ways in which transnational migration has been represented, understood, and constructed in the contemporary cinema of Italy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality and in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies, and feminist critiques, the six chapters of the book focus on a series of exemplary fiction films from the last twenty years, which both reflect and shape the nation’s responses to the growing presence of transnational migrants in Italian society. The book shows how questions of gender, sexual difference, and reproductivity have been central to Italian filmmakers’ approaches to stories of mobility and displacement. Gender is also enmeshed in the rhetoric and poetic of hospitality that filmmakers propose as a critical framework to condemn Italian border policies and politics. Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality traces an arc that moves from the embrace of a humanitarian rhetoric of infinite hospitality toward migrants, apparent in films produced in the early 2000s, to a more fluid understanding of Italian identities from a transnational perspective.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, efforts to improve human rights, social equality, and democracy in western Europe have faced growing challenges that range from economic and medical crises to the resurgence of the tribalist far right. Studying western European cinema reveals how filmmakers have been using their art to reflect on the region’s contemporary problems and potentials. In Conflict and Survival in Contemporary Western European Film, John Alexander Williams and Alexandra Hagen have collected a diverse array of essays that analyzehow filmmakers have portrayed forms of strifeand endurancein the new century. Divided into three thematic sections—historical conflicts and national identities; migrants, natives, and battles over space; and ethical struggles in everyday life—this book offers case studies of historical context, narrative, and form in a range of significant recent films. Showcasing such movies as Days of Glory, A War, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, Toni Erdmann, The Great Beauty, and Weekend, this fascinating collection presents contemporary filmmakers as critical citizen-artists who are directly involved in interrogating the past, present, and future of Europe.

Film and television offer important insights into social outlooks on borders in France and Europe more generally. This book undertakes a visual cultural history of contemporary borders through a film and television tour. It traces on-screen borders from the Gare du Nord train station in Paris to Calais, London, Lampedusa and Lapland. It contends that different types of mobilities and immobilities (refugees, urban commuters, workers in a post-industrial landscape) and vantage points (from borderland forests, ports, train stations, airports, refugee centers) are all part of a complex French and European border narrative. It covers a wide range of examples, from popular films and TV series to auteur fiction and documentaries by well-known directors from across Europe and beyond.

Brexit and the Migrant Voice provides a platform for the perspectives of European citizens and migrants living and working in the UK by assessing their representation in British and European cultural productions (literature, drama, the media) and by foregrounding their attitudes, their fears, and their concerns about Brexit. The book looks at Brexit through the eyes of Britain’s European citizens (‘Europe in Britain’), while also looking at European perceptions of Britain as a nation (‘Britain in Europe’), via a geographical journey – from West to East –across Europe. The book assesses how these countries, their citizens, and their cultural productions engage with the questions and challenges posed by Brexit. It brings together an exciting line-up of European academics and scholars, both early-career and well-established, from a variety of subject disciplines. Some live and work within UK Higher Education Institutions and thus look at Britain from within, while others reside within their countries of origin and look at Britain from the outside. Their chapters assess Brexit via a plethora of cultural outputs – Brexit fiction from their individual countries, opinion pieces, press discussions, but also narratives of compatriots affected by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The authors’ individual focal points on fiction, journalism, blog posts, theatre performances, and other cultural productions offer an innovative and comprehensive picture about thoughts on Brexit from around Europe that will fill an important gap in the market. This book will appeal to the academic market at undergraduate, postgraduate, and academic researcher level in a wide variety of disciplines including Literature, Politics and International Relations, European Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Media Studies.

This study explores the representation of international migration on screen and how it has gained prominence and salience in European filmmaking over the past 100 years. Using Polish migration as a key example due to its long-standing cultural resonance across the continent, this book moves beyond a director-oriented approach and beyond the dominant focus on postcolonial migrant cinemas. It succeeds in being both transnational and longitudinal by including a diverse corpus of more than 150 films from some twenty different countries, of which Roman Polański’s The Tenant, Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois couleurs: Blanc are the best-known examples. Engaging with contemporary debates on modernisation and Europeanisation, the author proposes the notion of “close Otherness” to delineate the liminal position of fictional characters with a Polish background. Polish Migrants in European Film 1918-2017 takes the reader through a wide range of genres, from interwar musicals to Cold War defection films; from communist-era exile right up to the contemporary moment. It is suitable for scholars interested in European or Slavic studies, as well as anyone who is interested in topics such as identity construction, ethnic representation, East-West cultural exchanges and transnationalism.