Postcolonial purgatory

Abstract

Stephen Frears’s (2002) film Dirty Pretty Things is a compelling thriller-romance much lauded for the way it reveals the invisible underworld of twenty-first-century Britain’s unregulated immigrant workforce (Hovet, 2006). The film weaves a poignant love story between two such migrants, the Nigerian Okwe and Turkish Senay, into a much darker plot surrounding the illegal trade in body organs. Both have fled their home countries in search of new identities, only to become trapped in a hellish existence in London. With only a limited awareness of the dangers she will face, Senay volunteers to be a kidney donor in order to gain a passport to leave the country. Against his convictions, Okwe, a trained doctor, agrees to do the operation in order to protect her. By entering the illegal trade Senay unwittingly exposes herself to a sexual attack. Throughout the film bodies and body parts are traded for official identities in a similarly violent and exploitative way. This insidious economy makes both love and any definitive sense of home or community for the migrants seem impossible.KeywordsAsylum SeekerInformal EconomyGlobal CityIllegal TradeGlobal MigrantThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.