Migrant and diasporic filmmaking in Europe has gained increasing academic recognition over the past decades for challenging the notions of national cinema and raising questions about the issues of space, place, and identity (Naficy, 2001; Berghahn and Sternberg, 2010; Bayraktar, 2015, Trifonova, 2020). However, despite the broad scope of previous research both on the representation of migrant women (Ponzanesi, 2011) and the work of migrant women filmmakers (Freedman and Tarr, 2000; Eren, 2003; Ballesteros, 2015), there remains a notable absence of a comprehensive conceptualisation of migrant women’s cinema in a wider context outside the borders of national cinemas. This thesis locates migrant women’s cinema at the intersection of the concepts of European cinema, world cinema, and women’s cinema, considering it to be a distinctive mode of filmmaking. Through case studies such as Inch’Allah Dimanche (Yamina Benguigui, France, 2000), Fremde Haut (Angelina Maccarone, Germany, 2005), and I am Nasrine (Tina Gharavi, the UK, 2012), this thesis explores how migrant women’s cinema addresses the questions of border-crossing and displacement through a gendered perspective, concentrating on the female characters as an ‘active protagonist of migration’ (Morokvasic, 2014). The thesis also considers the question of female authorship (Grant, 2001; Thornham, 2019) regarding the diverse techniques migrant women filmmakers navigate between their identities and the communities in which the films take place. Moreover, the thesis posits a cinematic language that offers an alternative voice for the representation and subjectification of female migration. Through close textual analysis, with particular attention to the framing of space and place, it argues that migrant women’s films capture their protagonists’ hybrid identities and the challenges of living in between from a distinctly gendered point of view.
