Migration on Screen: Why Cinema Keeps Looking North

Migration has long been a recurring subject in cinema. From wartime displacement to contemporary border crossings, films keep returning to stories of departure, arrival, loss, aspiration, and belonging. Yet we still know surprisingly little about how migration is represented in films.

Think about classic works such as “Casablanca” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as well as more recent movies like “The Terminal” or “One Battle After Another.” Much has been written about individual masterpieces, specific national cinemas, or particular genres. What has been missing is a broader, longitudinal view of how migration has been portrayed across decades, regions, and formats. This is an important omission because films contribute to the creation of a shared imaginary of how people understand migration, its causes, and impacts.

This blog post draws on a recently published article based on a global dataset of 410 documentaries, feature films, and television series released between 1940 and 2024 in which migration is central to the story. The dataset is freely available for anyone to consult. By looking at where these narratives are set, which languages they use, and which themes they develop, the analysis offers the first comparative mapping of migration representation in mainstream audiovisual storytelling across eight decades.

Two overarching patterns can be observed. The first is what can be described as a “North-bound bias.” The second is the growing dominance of what has been termed the “spectacle of human mobility.” Together, these patterns point to a way in which certain aspects of migration are made more visible than others.

The North-Bound Bias

The geographic distribution of migration movies is strikingly uneven. Europe and North America overwhelmingly dominate as settings. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany appear repeatedly as the principal destinations. Meanwhile, many regions that are central to forced displacement and migration flows more generally, including the Darién Gap, Cox’s Bazar, and cities like Dubai, Mexico City, and New Delhi, receive far less cinematic attention.

Even when migration from these regions is depicted, as in “Sin Nombre,” the narrative often remains oriented toward the journey northward. South–South migration and intra-regional mobility remain comparatively marginal in global film production, despite being far more common in reality.

This imbalance is also reflected in language. English is by far the most common language of migration-themed films, followed by French, Spanish, and Italian. Widely spoken languages such as Hindi or Japanese appear much less frequently in globally distributed migration movies.

Overall, migration in movies is generally framed as movement from the Global South toward high-income countries in Europe or North America. These regions represent the horizon of aspiration, crisis, or resolution. Other migration trajectories exist on screen, but they are less visible and less central to the dominant narrative.

The Spectacle of Human Mobility

The thematic evolution of migration films reveals another major pattern. In the 1940s and 1950s, migration cinema was strongly marked by war-related displacement, survival, and internal movement, as in “Rome, Open City.” In the decades that followed, labor migration, integration, and diaspora experiences gained prominence, for example, in Ali: “Fear Eats the Soul.” In the 1990s and early 2000s, stories of return migration and second-generation identity negotiations became more common, as seen in “Bend It Like Beckham.”

Since the 2010s, however, films focusing on forced displacement and undocumented migration have grown rapidly and now dominate. Border crossings, dangerous sea journeys, trafficking networks, detention, and refugee camps have become central to the narrative, as in “Mediterranea” or “Fire at Sea.” These works are often artistically compelling and politically urgent. Yet, taken together, they contribute to a collective picture in which migration is overwhelmingly associated with crisis, danger, and irregularity.

This can be described as the “spectacle of human mobility.” In this dynamic, the most dramatic, risky, and emotionally intense forms of movement receive disproportionate attention. The everyday realities of labor migration, family reunification, long-term settlement, circular mobility, or transnational professional lives appear far less frequently. Even films that represent routine mobility, such as “The Namesake” or “Past Lives,” remain comparatively rare.

The distinction matters because most international mobility actually takes place through legal and structured channels. Yet in cinema stories, irregular crossings and refugee crises are far more visible than routine forms of movement. Over time, such repeated emphasis can reinforce the idea that migration is primarily a matter of emergency and exception, rather than a normal part of how people live and move.

A Very Specific View of Migration

Films reach wide and diverse audiences, circulate across borders, and often outlast the political moments in which they are produced. They contribute to the broader symbolic environment in which migration is discussed in news media, classrooms, policy arenas, and everyday conversation. Cinema is an important part of the cultural environment in which migration is discussed, debated, and ultimately imagined.

The analysis of eight decades of migration movies shows that cinematic storytelling is growing in numbers but remains uneven in focus. Europe and North America dominate as destinations, while crisis-centered and irregular forms of mobility dominate over more mundane forms of human mobility. Together, these patterns create a partial and unbalanced picture of human movement.

This is not to suggest that films should abandon stories of suffering or danger. Yet, the overall imbalance deserves attention. When certain trajectories and experiences are repeatedly highlighted while others remain marginal, public understanding of migration can become distorted, with important effects on how people imagine human mobility and its role in society.

Lorenzo Piccoli is an Assistant Professor working on migration governance at the Migration Policy Centre and School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute and an nccr – on the move Associated Researcher.

Reference:

–Lorenzo Piccoli, Migration representation in movies from 1940 to 2024: The spectacle of human mobility and the North-bound bias, Migration Studies, Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2026, mnag003. (doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnag003)