Abstract

Since the first decades of the twentieth century, Portugal has affirmed itself as an emigration country. This social, political, economic and demographic phenomenon has consequences, which have always been approached in a general way, neglecting the personal side and identity aspects that the displacement causes at an individual and family level. In long duration emigration, there is usually a paradoxical feeling of non-belonging/belonging to two spaces. On the one hand, already integrated in the new reality, the individual feels that to a certain extent they belong to the new space. However, in their identity memory, the culture and way of life of their nationality, region or place still exists. This dilemma of (non)belonging is relatively abstract to convey to students, when we work the demographic phenomenon. We used a recent film—The Golden Cage, released by the son of Portuguese emigrants—where this feeling of belonging is represented, under ‘the cover’ of a comedy. We showed the film to a group of Demography and Sociology students and had them explore this phenomenon. The results were extremely positive.

Highlights

  • Since the first decades of the twentieth century, Portugal has affirmed itself as an emigration country

  • It is an experience and a case study, whose final objective was to verify the effectiveness of this strategy in higher education, based on the use of cinema to tackle complex concepts of Demography and Geography

  • We could verify the assertiveness of the strategy by comparing the results with the levels reached by students in previous years, when cinema had not been used as a didactic tool

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Summary

Introduction

Since the first decades of the twentieth century, Portugal has affirmed itself as an emigration country This social, political, economic and demographic phenomenon has consequences, which have always been considered in a more general approach, neglecting the personal side and identity aspects that the displacement causes at an individual level. The inheritance of memory passes from one generation to another, but it is vague and meaningless for the ones who have never known or lived effectively in their parents’ homeland. They belong to a reality but are constantly confronted with disconnected inherited memories.

Theoretical Framework
Experiment
Results and Discussion
Conclusions

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