{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025320056899004267, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004267425320056899, 'mean_word_length': 5.621468926553672, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Refugees on film

The article considers one dominant tendency of independent filmmaking, and its impact on the treatment of the refugee (broadly conceived): the application of contemporary documentary methods to both fiction and nonfiction works. The goal is a preliminary exploration of the complex, context-sensitive political effects of the approach, sometimes dubbed the “documentary style”, as resistance of (and/or submission to) the hegemonic global-nationalist order. To this end, the paper investigates specifically how such filmmaking efforts may—or may not—redirect the phenomenological vehicle of imagination away from narrow nationalist imaginaries towards a broader humanist identification and emotional (and normative) investment in the stranger or “the other” per se. The focus is on two works in particular, Another News Story (Orban Wallace, 2017) and Before Summer Ends (Avant la fin de l’été, Maryam Goormaghtigh, 2017), identifying how the filmmakers’ broadly pluralistic techniques help avoid the potentially dehumanising pitfalls of more didactic approaches, but also generate their own potential limitations. While the slackening of the subject’s categorical—and the plot’s narrative—shape may be liberating, it also risks a phenomenological disconnection on the part of the potentially interested spectator. The cognitive effects—including impediments to memory and recall—may thus weaken the work’s potential as a vehicle of cultural awareness and social identification. Daily news reports attest to a widespread xenophobic turn, routinely expressed in negative images of and attitudes towards migrants, whether blessed with the legitimacy of refugee status or otherwise. Though not itself the focus of analysis, such a political landscape forms the context and point of departure of what follows. The “hostile environment”—a stipulated objective of British immigration policy since 2010—normalises discourse and imagery indifferent and/or hostile to perceived interlopers. What follows is a consideration of efforts to use the vehicle of moving images against the grain of this environment, in order to depict the migrant in a way that promotes greater understanding and sympathy. Its motivation is an explicitly political interest in the conditions of a more positive and mutually rewarding encounter between host and refugee. Social-scientific—or humanistic—inquiry is, as Robert Cox maintains, “always for someone and for some purpose” (128; emphasis in the original). Its rigour depends not on the dubious exercise of assuming a position of impartiality but on making one’s normative presuppositions as transparent as possible. With this in mind, the work at hand reflects an interest in how beliefs, values and norms might be affected (if not reconstituted) in a way that enhances receptiveness to both the needs of those who relocate across national boundaries, and to their potential value as new impulses or contributors. This is an empirical question in itself, but one directed by solidarist normative considerations, specifically to serve a globally egalitarian social agenda, assuming that insight into how such an agenda is served might be of use, at least in principle, to its embodied servants: those who pursue such broadly progressive goals through their artistic or political practice. The question of how films might affect audiences’ empathetic identification with the migrant subject is empirical but not easily susceptible to investigation, let alone the yielding of