Forced Migration: Film as Testimony Juan Jorge Michel Fariña Eduardo Laso Fleeing from one’s own land to save your life configures a cruel paradox: what kind of life can one have without a home, without loved ones, a tradition, or a language? The 20th century has been called the “genocide century.” We need not look further than the most emblematic episodes: the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor of Ukraine, the Shoah, the Indonesian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Latin American state terrorisms. All were accompanied by the forced displacement of people in the form of expulsions, exile, or obligatory diaspora. Film has given testimony to these processes with an extensive inventory of movies that have continued to grow every day so far in the new century. Analyzing these films will offer a better comprehension of the issue’s complexity and of the ways it is portrayed culturally and socially. This chapter will journey through a half dozen groundbreaking films and television series that center around this issue. The itinerary will take us from the film The Invader (Nicolas Provost, 2011), whose initial travelling represents with stark clarity the bitter arrival of African immigrants on European shores. From there, we will go on to classic works such as Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002), that propose us a mise en abîme of the Armenian genocide. In each of these films, art illuminates our reflection: we are confronted with a very real situation that offers the opportunity to do something about the trauma of exile, expulsion, or ostracism. Perhaps the cinematographic setting most distant from forced displacement can be found in the legendary glaciation scenes recreated in the film Ice Age (Chris Wedge & Carlos Saldanha, 2002). The animated images of a herd of prehistoric animals heading south in search of warmer lands are unsettling. It is curious that a movie created with children in mind has so powerfully spurred adults to reflect on loneliness, solidarity, and social bonds in extreme situations (Lewkowicz & Corea, 2004; Hellemeyer, 2014). One of the most eloquent films that narrate contemporary tragedies is La bestia (Pedro Ultreras, 2010), portraying Central American migrants who wend their way to the Mexican-United States border. This work has been analyzed by muralist Claudia Bernardi (2019), who so movingly tells of her encounter with the monster: When I heard them talk about “the beast” I imagined it as a wild, elusive animal that stalks the thousands of Central American migrants who attempt to cross the merciless Sonora desert between Mexico and the United States, where extreme variations in temperatures can be deadly during both the relentless summer heat and the frigid winters, which even keep the snakes and scorpions at bay. Buzzards are the only ones left to feed off the death of others. (p. 9)
However, the term does not refer to a force of nature but rather to a monstrosity engendered by progress. La bestia (The Beast) is the common name for the freight train which migrants climb upon in Arriaga, Ixtepec, or Hidalgo in southern Mexico that takes them near Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras, or New Laredo. With migrants precariously holding onto the train’s roof, this
