Narratives of migration and the sense of crisis in post-2008 European cinema

International migration has become one of the most pressing issues of contemporary political life in Europe. Moreover, in many European societies, it has become the most visible face of the post-2008 crisis, an issue much more visible, dramatic, sensational, and cinematic than the regulation of banks or the controversies of neoliberal capitalism. In this chapter, Kalmár argues that the phenomenon of large-scale international migration in a rapidly transforming post-2008 Europe creates new challenges for European cinema, too, a crisis of cinematic representation. He concentrates solely on post-2008 examples of migrating people and host-migrant encounters, paradigms that reveal the symptoms of this cinematic crisis, and the struggle for authentic representations. Focusing on two award-winning films, the Italian Terraferma (2011) and the Rumanian Morgen (2010), the chapter explores the ethical, epistemological, and cinematic paradoxes of encounters with otherness, and investigates the ways in which narratives of crisis may (or may not) turn into crisis of narratives.