Cinema and Migration

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Cinema and hospitality in a broad sense: how do films embody the art of welcoming, of hosting, of including and caring? Three months after his election in 2013, Pope Francis visited the Island of Lampedusa (Italy), one of the world’s deadliest forefronts of the humanitarian catastrophe often referred to as the global “refugee crisis.” He denounced the “globalization of indifference” in which no one wants to take responsibility for “our brothers and sisters” migrants who suffer and die. Ten years later, while the Pope is again addressing the “crisis” in Marseilles, in the month of August 2023 alone, 2,095 “migrants” have lost their lives in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean Ocean. Through a general concept of “hospitality,” our class will offer a holistic, cinematic approach to a world scene in which an unprecedented number of individuals are forced to flee their homes. We will focus on the (extremely) old notion of hospitality (a decisively matrixial one) and analyze films that put this concept at their core both formally and narratively. One critical goal will be to explore the various cultural understandings and practices that forge the highly cultural, both idiosyncratic and universal art of inviting, including, unconditionally hosting, and caring for the guest, the stranger, the child, the unknown. An ideal of protection, empathy, and compassion without which there is no responsibility, no ethics, all concepts that are the cornerstone of a feminist ethics that will nourish our research.