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The Joy of Travel

In his third ethnofictional film Travel [2016] the sociologist, ethnographer and filmmaker Nicola Mai challenges, through an experimental exploration of migrants’ experiences and perspectives, the ways in which today’s policies regarding sex-work migration are framed in terms of trafficking [cf. Jedlowski, Visual Anthropology, 31(3): 236–252]. Over 63minutes viewers follow the chaotic trajectory of Joy, a fictional character embodying the real-life events of eight Nigerian sex-workers in Paris with whom Nicola Mai cowrote the scenario during weekly workshops held for almost a year. The participative and filmic-based methodology reveals then how neoliberal discourses incarnated by institutions like OFPRA—the French office in charge of protection and asylum—lead migrants to re-evaluate their own biography through the scope of victimization and vulnerability. As we will see, a twoscreen video display has been used by the filmmaker to represent this complex process. The first scene opens at night in the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris with a mise en sc ene of the ethnographic methodology. The two screens respectively show in a close-up the ethnographer in “the field” asking questions and Joy answering his survey about the sex-workers’ perspective on a French draft bill aimed at penalizing their clients [Figure 1]. Given that this field is usually difficult to access and extremely concerned with anonymity, the viewer wonders how the sociologist manages to film there with not only one but two cameras—until hearing at the end of the interaction some off-frame applause and a “thank you!” from what we take to be the film-crew now satisfied with the take. The narrative pact is clearly made explicit by the filmic grammar and content of the following scene. One of the two screens (the other being temporarily off) broadcasts a making-of sequence shot with one camera whose shaking zoom-outs and abrupt changes of shooting axes have been edited in, giving a documentary feeling to a scene the viewer might hence believe to be real. In it,