Voyage to a Relative North: The Crossing of Intangible Barriers in Merzak Allouache’s Harragas
In this article I study Merzak Allouache's Harragas (2009), a film devoted to the current... more In this article I study Merzak Allouache's Harragas (2009), a film devoted to the current crisis of migration from the South to the North of the Mediterranean. By focusing on the intangible barriers that the characters in this film have to cross in their trip from Algeria to Spain, I illustrate how the director employs a report-like realism to provide a lucid and even openly critical portrait of post-civil war Algeria. I analyze the director's references to the laws regulating migration approved by the Algerian parliament in 2008 and 2009, comparing them with the European legal frameworks regulating the movement of people across its borders, in order to reconstruct the terms of what I call the coalition, among Mediterranean countries, against the contemporary " wretched of the earth " .
In this article I study Merzak Allouache's Harragas (2009), a film devoted to the current crisis ... more In this article I study Merzak Allouache's Harragas (2009), a film devoted to the current crisis of migration from the South to the North of the Mediterranean. By focusing on the intangible barriers that the characters in this film have to cross in their trip from Algeria to Spain, I illustrate how the director employs a report-like realism to provide a lucid and even openly critical portrait of post-civil war Algeria. I analyze the director's references to the laws regulating migration approved by the Algerian parliament in 2008 and 2009, comparing them with the European legal frameworks regulating the movement of people across its borders, in order to reconstruct the terms of what I call the coalition, among Mediterranean countries, against the contemporary " wretched of the earth " .
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