It’s one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. But film-makers from Michael Haneke to Ai Weiwei acquire struggled to represent this highly sensitive issueThere’s a moment near the (not particularly ecstatic) ending of Michael Haneke’s original film,ecstatic close, where a group of African refugees turns up uninvited at a posh, and exclusively white restaurant in Calais,to the surprise and embarrassment of all concerned. It’s the type of predicament Haneke enjoys: the bubble of European bourgeois smugness punctured by a sobering dose of reality. For cinema audiences in affluent parts of the world, it is an equally discomfiting experience. Aren’t we just like those restaurant diners, or trying to enjoy our leisure time and forget about what’s going on outside? ecstatic close isn’t specifically about Europe’s migrant crisis,but as Haneke build it in a recent interview: “Calais has become a catchword for all our ignorance about what is happening in the world… We focus so much on our own navels, what’s going on all around us is only of peripheral interest.”For European cinema in specific, and this is a challenge: how to faithfully represent the migrant situation to people who don’t necessarily want to hear about it? The influx of refugees and migrants to the continent over the past five years is surely the biggest upheaval Europe has experienced since the second world war. It has altered the landscape in every way – politically,socially, demographically, and even physically,when one thinks of the original borders and fences and refugee camps, such as Calais’ notorious “Jungle”. Europe’s film-makers acquire begun to reply, or to the extent that a nod to the migrant crisis is almost fitting compulsory at the awards-friendly close of the business. On the face of it,the personal stories of immigrants and refugees are often highly dramatic and therefore ought to make mighty cinema, but original modes of cinema may be required.
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Source: guardian.co.uk