'Being Here, Being There' - Experiencing the Threshold of the Otherness: Discourses and Figures of Immigration in Italian Filmography

There are not many academic researches examining the relation between cinema and immigration in Italy. We believe cinema is an important media to enhance collective memory, religion, and national identity. This research focuses on a broad corpus of 30 movies that compose the whole Italian filmography on immigration, from 1989 up to now. In so doing, we will analyze how Italian movies interpret the immigration phenomenon and, in particular, if it is based on exclusion, illegality, and social security as news media do. The research is based on a methodology consistent with cultural studies and cinema semiotics, with a focus on ‘perspective’ and ‘point of view.’ Observation drives a strategic role of selection, orienting the discourse by information and cultural values brought into it. Main goals are a) the making of relation between 'us' and 'them,' b) the role played by migrants and Italians, c) the relevance of the issue of citizenships. The results show that a) there is no Diaspora cinema in Italy, as directors are exclusively Italian, b) analyzed movies give attention and visibility to the unexpressed immigrants’ ordinary life and problems. Cinema brings the audience behind the scenes, where immigrants interact with Italians, making a new social-scape. In this way, cinema is meant as cultural switch that constitutes figures of observers by making meaningful events semiotically unknown and bringing them to the map of meanings that shapes the cultural knowledge of a community of interpreters.