Globalization sent millions of people on the road. Decolonization after World War II brought people from India, Asia, and the Caribbean to England, from Algeria and West Africa to France, from Indonesia to the Netherlands. Latin Americans and Asians immigrated to Australia and North America, while the fall of the USSR sent people from the former Soviet states to seek their fortunes in western Europe, Israel, and the United States. People fled Mao’s China for other parts of East Asia, while Filipinos searched for work in Hong Kong. The world became a web of crisscrossing diasporas, with people trying to sink new roots while still yearning for the lands they had left. “A world with a hundred kinds of home,” writes Pico Iyer, “will accommodate a thousand kinds of homesickness. ”7
This migration of populations created a form of “world film” quite far from the dreams of the U. S. Majors. Ever since cinema began, directors and other creative personnel traveled among countries, but the heightened pace and greater dispersion of migration after 1980 created something new. Hollywood emigres like Fritz Lang and Maurice Tourneur did not make films about leaving Germany or France. In the closing years of the twentieth century, though, filmmakers began to explore the experience of migration, the sense of floating among
28.5 Turkish lovers in Lola and Billy the Kid (production still).
Cultures, speaking minority languages, being shut off from the mainstream, and living divided social lives.
The result were films of dispersion and displacement, a cinema of diaspora. In Paris, the Peronist Fernando Solanas filmed Tangos: Exile of Gardel (1985), a reflection on Argentine popular culture as recalled from afar (p. 637). Tony Gatlif, a Romany living in France, made Latcho Dram (1993) as a tribute to gypsy music. Several Iranians who had fled the Muslim fundamentalist revolution cooperated with director Reza Allame-hzadeh to film The Guests of Hotel Astoria (1989), which portrays exiled Iranians waiting to find asylum in Europe.
Much diasporic filmmaking sprang from second - or third-generation immigrants who had lived in the host culture long enough to grasp its customs but who also participated in a mature immigrant subculture. In Paris, beurs (second-generation Arabs from North Africa) created novels and films about their society, as in Mehdi Charif’s portrait of a transvestite, Miss Mona (1986). The Moroccan director Philippe Faucon based Samia
(2001) on a coming-of-age novel about beur life. Turks became a significant minority in Germany when they were invited in as guest workers during the 1960s; over the next forty years, Berlin became a center of Turkish life. Kutlig Ataman’s Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) portrays a young German Turk who learns that the brother whom he believed dead is actually a transvestite performing in gay nightclubs (28.5).
Often the second-generation character gains access to his or her roots not through direct memory but through popular culture. Gurinda Chadha grew up in England watching Indian cinema with her father, so her
28.6 Bhaji on the Beach: a middle-aged woman romps with her lover in a sequence reminiscent of a Bollywood musical.
Bhaji on the Beach (1993) uses dazzling imagery reminiscent of Bollywood romances (28.6) to portray the adventures of Indian women visiting the seaside resort of Blackpool.
As each nation became more ethnically mixed, filmmakers of all origins were attracted by the dramatic possibilities of populations confronting or blending. In La Haine (“Hatred,” 1996), Mathieu Kassovitz, himself an emigrant from Hungary, filmed suburban housing-project gangs that throw together beurs and white youths. Because Italian filmmaker Roberta Torre believed that migration would become the great theme of the new century, her South Side Story: The Real Story of Julietto and Romea (2000) made Shakespeare’s hero a Sicilian youth and his beloved a Nigerian girl. Such films could record and express the displacement felt by migrating populations. When everyone seemed to be living in a new place, traveling to another place, forming part of what Iyer calls “the global soul,” diasporic cinema was another way in which national and regional cultures gained a wide resonance.
World History
