Re-orienting the gaze: visualising refugees in recent film

This chapter centralizes questions of visibility regarding contemporary refugee movement by focusing on recent filmmaking by and about refugees. The visual works explored here suggest a shifting refugee imaginary which tackles head on the complex representational politics of the human rights regime and positions refugees as active agents rather than passive objects of pity. I chart the ways in which recent fiction and non-fiction film re-frame the often-objectifying humanitarian gaze of news media and subvert the politics of affect that works on feelings of both fear and compassion among settled or citizen audiences. My analysis of this visual landscape considers how effective these varied strategies are for moving beyond a representational politics perpetually caught between visibility and occlusion, between the demand for rights framed by humanitarian regimes and the right to evade interpolation as figures of either vulnerability or threat