Becoming refugees: Exodus and contemporary mediations of the refugee crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the political aesthetics of the current ‘refugee crisis’, and the life-and-death stakes of the struggle over the meaning of foreignness that is taking place. It focuses on emergent forms of political film-making that employ mobile technologies. These include videos made on phones and distributed online or edited into documentary films, all of which are being employed in a struggle over the meaning of refugeeism. The mobile phone has acquired a crucial symbolic significance with regard to the plight of refugees, offering a means of both documenting their experience and distributing these audio-visual records. The article’s key case study is the BBC documentary Exodus: Our Journey to Europe (2016). A participatory project, Exodusassembles footage shot by refugees filming their journeys on mobile phones at huge personal risk. This article asks what role film plays in documenting, and intervening in, the refugee crisis, and to what extent documentaries such as Exodusconstitute a reconfigured or expanded transnational cinema, a new aesthetic that can offer an alternative perspective that moves beyond the conventional binary categories of foreigners as either powerless, infantilised victims or dangerous invaders.