Investigating multimodal analysis in female documentaries about refugees crisis: a case study

Abstract

The art of documentary filmmaking has always been seen as a way of representing the world in a myriad of subjective ways. It is the ideal medium that represents migration, flight and exile. Attuned to the depiction of landscape, physical environments, and the movement of bodies through space, documentaries representations shift dynamically from microscopic detail to macroscopic overview, from the particularity of the local to the generality of the global, from the individual to the mass. When it comes to migration issues, documentaries represent the complexities of the journeys of refugees focus on various cross-cultural issues surrounding representation in documentary filmmaking, both in front of and behind the camera. Through the analysis of the BBC film "The Hidden Lives of House Girls" produced in 2019, the study produces multi-faceted narratives towards the analysis of African gender studies which are seldom tackled. The study uses Machin and Mayr (2012) multimodal analysis to explore the central question of "Who has the right to tell whose story, and why, how documentaries shed light on the refugee's crisis especially when it comes to young females and what are the ethical considerations that are represented in the depictions of African refugees?" Through the analysis of verbal and non-verbal components incorporated in the filmmaker's choice of certain elements in the film, the study elucidates that the use of the linguistic and semiotics choices helped greatly in showing the suffering of Eastern Ugandan young women when they travel to neighbouring countries to work as domestic workers. In addition, the representation strategies used in the visual communication were utilized perfectly to unravel the complexities endured in the lives of three girls. Also, the participant-observant mode helped in making the audience engaged in the protagonists' lives as they were directly involved in the film narrative.