A crack in representation: migrants between police and politics in the movie ‘Green border’ | Uma fenda na representação: imigrantes entre a polícia e a política no filme 'Zona de exclusão'
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/rmi.2025.91831Keywords:
Representation, Migration, Politics of aestheticsAbstract
The article analyzes the Polish movie Green border (2023), by Agnieszka Holland, to reflect on how a politics of aesthetics might challenge contemporary representations of migration in Europe. In the film, migrants enter the forest between Belarus and Poland to seek asylum in the European Union, being stopped by border guards and helped by activists. Drawing a connection between the guards’ and humanitarian agents’ actions and the logic of the police, in Rancière’s terms, the text shows how cracks in that logic allow for encounters with the migrants, pointing to new configurations of the sensible. As a cultural object, Green border exposes the coercive order of migratory governance in Europe, but also the possibility of displacing the “proper” place of migrant subjects. In this sense, it is political not simply because of its theme, but primarily because it cracks open a consensual representation of migrants.
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