Third World On the Move: Cinematic Destination Belgrade/Serbia

The aim of this paper is to map manifold notions of migrant cinema and its history, in other words, film narratives about migrations from, across, and to the Balkans. The analysis looks at broader Balkan cinema that features as the context for focusing the changes of the migration pattern from and to Belgrade. The paper takes Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying (Praktičan vodič kroz Beograd sa pevanjem i plakanjem, Bojan Vuletić, 2011) as its case study to show the recent reversal of migrant narratives in which the Balkans are the desired destination, in itself an exception to the rule. The analyses are based on the appropriated definition of migrant cinema and complemented with notions of inner exile and accented cinema.

On the Borderlines of South-Eastern Europe : Migration in the Films of Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik

This paper analyses recent works by Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik— Never Leave Me (2017) and The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018), respectively. These works narrate the evolving lives of migrants on the borderlines of the Balkan Anatolian region. Migrants’ aspiration to reach their “dream land” is interpreted as a journey towards unfolding “the virtual realities of consciousness” of both actors and directors. The reflections of both Begić and Žilnik on the issue of migration, filmed in an accented style, highlight their own post-Yugoslav perspectives, which allows us to analyse the two films in context of “return to homeland”—a concept present both in Naficy’s theories of an accented cinema and in Boym’s notion of “reflective nostalgia.”

Beyond the Voice of Egypt: Reclaiming Women’s Histories and Female Authorship in Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017)

By drawing on postcolonial feminist discourse and Hamid Naficy’s (2001) notion of ‘accented’ cinema, in particular his approach of combining the interstitial position of exilic and diasporic filmmakers with concepts of authorship and genre, this paper explores the intersection between biographical film, gendered rewriting of history, and self-narrative as a site of resistance to nationalist and patriarchal ideologies in Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017). I argue that Neshat’s authorial style and her position as an exilic artist inflect the biographical film in its traditional form, showcasing an innovative perspective on the genre, restructuring it to reveal the constructedness of not only a cinematic process, but also of history and historical figures. Blending the stories of a present-day Iranian woman filmmaker and the professional life of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum, Neshat displaces the biopic from its Western-centric roots by explicitly opening it up to a discourse of contemporary gender politics in the Middle East. In doing so, she exposes the social forces that shape the production of the biopic in relation to the notion of female authorship in the context of the transcultural circuits and feminist reclaiming of Oum Kulthum’s international stardom.

The Complexities of Exile, the Other, and the Postcolonial Predicament in Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cáit Murphy argues that Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) expresses an “accented style,” citing Hamid Naficy’s theorization of accented cinema in his 2001 study, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Drawing on Denis’s own exilic background, Murphy analyzes the depiction of contradictory exile in Denis’s film. Working from Naficy’s criteria for accented cinema, such as epistolarity, cultural hybridity, and Bakhtinian chronotopes, Murphy argues that the film’s protagonist Galoup (Denis Lavant) and the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti are paradoxical representations of belonging and Otherness.

Tragic Pathos and Border Syndrome: Constantine Giannaris’s Hostage

Giannaris’s film provides an original evocation of border crossing through its reimagining of the 1999 hijacking of an intercity bus in Greece by a clandestine Albanian migrant who endured police brutality in Greece. This chapter affords an in-depth analysis of the film’s form and thematic preoccupations so as to comprehend issues of mobility that are essential to (cinematic) migrant journeys. The author argues that the film’s layered use of on-screen and off-screen mobility reveal the politics of transnational migration and their impact on the migrant’s body. These conventions and their ideological are conveyed to the reader through close readings of select scenes. To further achieve this, the author resorts to the notion of ‘border syndrome’, coined by Gazmend Kapllani in his Short Border Handbook and to Hamid Naficy’s meditations on border subjects in his Accented Cinema, and argues that Hostage reimagines the migrant as a tragic outsider, prone to victimhood.

Transnational Dimensions of Iranian Cinema: “accented films” by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf left Iran in 2005 shortly after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The artist underwent a multiphase evolution away from the supporter of Islamic regime in the early 1980s to cosmopolitan internationally acclaimed auteur. Finally, he became not only a dissident filmmaker but also a political dissident in the aftermath of 2009 presidential election. As exile wears on, Makhmalbaf became postnational filmmaker, making a variety of “accented films”. Not all the consequences of internationalization are positive – to be successful in transnational environment he has to face much larger competition and the capitalist market. Having in mind the categories of displaced Iranian directors distinguished by Hamid Naficy – exilic, diasporic, émigré, ethnic, cosmopolitan – I would like to find out which one of them applies to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s life and work. I also will focus on the following questions: To what extent the censorship of Makhmalbaf’s artistic activity was a reason for his migration? how are migratory experiences expressed in his movies? What features of “the accented cinema” his movies are manifesting? I would argue that the experience of migration and the transnationality was the characteristic feature of Makhmalbaf’s his work long before leaving the home country. It can be said that regardless this stylistic diversity, all of Makhmalbaf’s movies made abroad can be described as the example of “accented cinema” which comprises different types of cinema made by exilic and diasporic filmmakers who live and work in countries other than their country of origin.

Displacement, exile and incarceration commuted into cinematic vision

Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (Behrouz Boochani and Arash Kamali Sarvestani, 2017) is a documentary that exposes the systematic torture of refugees banished by the Australian Government to Manus Prison (in Papua New Guinea and officially called the Manus Regional Processing Centre). Shot clandestinely from a mobile phone camera by Boochani and smuggled out for codirection with Kamali Sarvestani, the film documents an important phase in the history of migration to Australia. This article analyses the film by foregrounding the experience of displacement, exile and incarceration as a unique cinematic standpoint. Boochani’s cinematic vision and socio-political critique will be interpreted in terms of embodied knowing and his existential predicament. The symbiotic relationship between the experience of seeking asylum, exile, imprisonment and the filmmaking process raises critical questions regarding the film as anti-genre, common tropes used to define refugeehood, and the criteria necessary to interpret and evaluate cultural production created from this unique position. The article draws on theories pertaining to accented cinema and incorporates ideas from social epistemology. Furthermore, it considers the author’s dialogue and collaboration with Boochani and Kamali Sarvestani and examines the significance of various contributors to the filmmaking process and cinematic vision.

Seascapes of solidarity

Films about refugees have been embraced by accented cinema. Indeed, exilic filmmakers continue to test the boundaries of cinema, and specifically its strong bonds with nation and land. But not all exiles are refugees. This article offers that for Arab refugees the journeys across the sea define their filmmaking and thus also the refugee film. If we acknowledge the sea as a central theme, motif and stylistic element in (some) refugee cinema, spectators may be able to experience refugee cinema more ethically. Using the concept of “Mediterranean thinking” as a central analytical tool, this article focuses on the visual representations of refugees in films made on and in the Mediterranean Sea, problematising the injustices in the representation of refugees since the so-called “refugee crisis”. With a film-philosophical approach to four films from North Africa and Syria, I emphasise how filmmakers directly or indirectly address the senses of their spectators with a cinema that highlights the instability of knowledge and power through movement and fluidity. An in-depth analysis of the visual qualities of water places fluid space and time at the centre of these refugee films. In Mediterranean refugee filmmaking, water enables an embodied experience that leads to allegiance and sympathy, in order to achieve solidarity. This approach is based on a desire to contribute to a new historiography in the service of a more just world. Transnational journeys shape the representations of refugees travelling, transforming and transcending the Mediterranean. Ultimately, this article examines how the migrant and the sea itself develop with the “refugee crisis”, visualised in a cinema adrift on the Mediterranean Sea.

Accented Essay Films: The Politics and Poetics of the Essay Film in the Age of Migration

Igor Krstić brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’ (Hamid Naficy) with the category of the essay, in order to conceptualise a burgeoning body of film, video, and other moving image practices in what sociologists have termed ‘the age of migration.’ Through this confluence of a supposedly generic category (the essay film) with a theory that has been of great importance to film scholarship since its emergence, Krstić provides new perspectives on an emerging transnational body of films, all of which have been produced by diasporic, exilic or interstitial documentary and/or essay filmmakers in the recent past. In applying Naficy’s terminology, one can describe these examples as ‘accented essay films’, because they all deal with displacement, exile or migration in the essayistic format. His study includes readings of The Nine Muses(Akomfrah, 2009),Grandmother’s Flower(Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007), Home (Hruza, 2008) and A Hungarian Passport(Kogut, 2001).