On the Waterfront: Truth and Fiction in Postcolonial Cinema from the South of Europe

This essay deals with the role of postcolonial cinema in articulating and visualizing issues of migration, uprooting and alienation, with specific relation to Europe and the Southern Mediterranean shore. Cinema as a transnational medium is particularly suitable for conveying denunciation and social critique. Yet this must be combined with an understanding of how the different cinematic traditions and genres contribute, in specific aesthetic and ethical ways, towards conveying the message and impact on the audiences. The scope of this essay is to theorize migration in the context of postcolonial cinema and to discuss the space occupied by the documentary (genre/form) within the framework of postcolonial cinema that deals with migration. This will be done through the close reading of two migrant films produced in Spain and Italy, respectively: 14 Kilómetros (2007) and A Sud di Lampedusa (2006), both of which are concerned with the question of border crossing and African migrants’ attempts to reach the southern shore of Europe, following very different visual registers. This raises questions about the political and cultural contextualization of migration to Europe from Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, in which the Mediterranean assumes a new protagonist role that reconfigures our ideas about the porosity of Europe and the liquidity of cinema.