Migration cinema and Europe’s ‘unguarded door’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Italy’s status as Europe’s ‘unguarded door’ in terms of arriving migrants and refugees has both altered and intensified long-standing divisions – within Italy, as well as between Italy and the rest of Europe. This paper examines the cultural reverberations of the migration crisis in two films: Con il sole negli occhi (Sun in His Eyes, 2015), and Cose dell’altro mondo (Things from Another World, 2011). In different ways, both these films reveal Italy’s anxieties about cultural re-negotiation as it responds to the migration phenomenon, and to its own inferiority complex as Europe’s internal Other. At the same time, these films highlight how the influx of refugees and migrants into Europe has forced the European Union to examine its foundational aspirations of ‘unity in diversity’ and universal equality, because migration inherently poses the problem of inside v. outside. Reading these films against the ideals of inclusion and egalitarianism suggests that the Enlightenment idea of ‘united in diversity’ that informs the European cultural project is only ethical and egalitarian if it is universal, extending from Europeans to non-Europeans as well, and that it can succeed only if it is supported economically as well as rhetorically.