Screening Strangers

Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema

Yosefa Loshitzky

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2010

Where Published: Bloomington

"Loshitzky makes the crucial link between the political screening of new immigrants by European governments and societies with the cinematic screening of these immigrants by European directors, all the while offering sensitive and thick readings of the films." —Hamid Naficy, author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking

Yosefa Loshitzky challenges the utopian notion of a post-national "New Europe" by focusing on the waves of migrants and refugees that some view as a potential threat to European identity, a concern heightened by the rhetoric of the war on terror, the London Underground bombings, and the riots in Paris's banlieues. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, Loshitzky determines patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged, Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, and Michael Winterbottom's In This World, Code 46, and The Road to Guantanamo.

Posted by Daniela Berghahn on 06 Mar 2010 •