‘“Do the right thing”: encounters with undocumented migrants in contemporary European Cinema’

Performing and Reimagining White ‘Western’ Masculinity on the Baltic Screen / Valge „lääneliku“ mehelikkuse etendamine ja ümberkujutamine Balti kinoekraanil

“…In this scene Ralf's earlier experience crossing the Baltic Sea, portrayed in the film humorously as easier transitions to the Nordic societies, is differentiated from the experience of refugees of colour moving across borders. Giving one of the refugees his watch might function as a moment of realisation of that, but it also aligns Ralf with the common trope of the white Western European protagonist in European films about migrants and refugees who learn about them, tries to help them, but in a paternalistic or self-serving way, and without any real effect on the refugees' lives as they often remain in precarious situations (see more in Celik Rappas and Phillis 2020). The Dissidents does not elaborate on this trope further, but by ending the film with Ralf becoming this figure, it establishes that he has become a Western European who can now make a generous gesture to refugees of colour, from whom he is differentiated.…”

“…While a generically and thematically somewhat different film, The Lawyer starts out with the figure of the generous Western man in 2010s Baltic countries. It meditates on whether his attempts at helpful gestures towards a refugee with whom he is in love function as a rendition of the hackneyed white saviour motif in Western European and North American media, or whether he, as both a minoritised and privileged Baltic protagonist, might deconstruct the white saviour figure, a well-meaning but paternalistic and ultimately self-serving white character that is a common depiction of white European protagonists in European films about refugees and migrants (see more about such films in Celik Rappas and Phillis 2020). Playing more with film form, as it refers to Douglas Sirk's and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's melodramas, The Lawyer arrives at a similar conclusion as these films, which, according to Jonathan Goldberg (2016), shows how despite seeming progress in their respective societies, much is still the same.…”

The aesthetic turn in border studies: Visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion

“…For Kovačević (2019), the acclaimed docudrama Fire at Sea (2016) freezes migrants in their perilous Mediterranean journeys, with the effect of concealing the broader geopolitical context and possibilities for future integration. Celik Rappas and Phillis (2020) similarly emphasise how European film productions “utilize the ‘Other’ in need as a European avatar in order to construct a compassionate European identity, one firmly devoted to humanitarian ideals” (p. 39). Humanitarian tropes are also present in the videographic narratives produced by the Italian Navy during operation Mare Nostrum , which, by simplifying migration to a question of saving lives and stopping smugglers, have silenced its underlying causes and thus further de‐politicised discourses around it (Musarò, 2016).…”

Talent has no race, has no face - but it has a skin colour: The ‘appropriate femininity’ with the case of Kurdish-Swedish Actress Evin Ahmad

“…However, in the context of Europe, the empirical research in media and film studies hitherto focuses mainly on the representation of migrants and descendants of non-Europeans/non-natives in contemporary European cinema ( Çelik Rappas & Phillis, 2018 ; Loshitzky, 2010 ) or migrant and diasporic film making ( Ballesteros, 2015 ; Berghahn & Sternberg, 2010 ; Ponzanesi, 2012 ). In this sense, however, the experiences of non-white or non-European actresses (not necessarily from Black communities) in European film industries are understudied.…”