A salient social and political issue in Europe in recent years has been the increasing number of people fleeing war and poverty and attempting to gain entry to the continent. During the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16, over a million people sought asylum in European Union countries, more than double the number for the previous year. As Prem Kumar Rajaram notes (2016: 2), a prevalent Eurocentric perspective on these events holds that ‘it is Europe that has had the “difficult year”, not migrants’. Politicians such as Viktor Orbán and David Cameron responded with dehumanising language, conflating refugees with economic migrants and ‘illegal immigrants’ to talk of ‘unknown masses’ and a ‘swarm’ threatening to engulf the continent. While newspapers and television often amplified this hysteria, the topic has since become ‘only intermittently visible in mainstream Northern European news media’, such that, in Bruce Bennett's phrase, ‘the “refugee crisis” is in part “a representational crisis”’ (2018: 15). Furthermore, a discourse of ‘crisis’ has been used strategically to reinforce the border regime that produced it. Nicholas De Genova writes of the Mediterranean ‘deathscape’:

As both the number of ‘illegalised’ people seeking to enter Fortress Europe and the death toll in the Mediterranean have mounted, some commentators have argued for a mass resettlement programme, comparable to that undertaken for 1.3 million refugees from Indochina in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Another response, from engaged film-makers working across Europe, has been to stage fictional, symbolic rescues of refugees and ‘clandestines’. Here I analyse films by directors Aki Kaurismäki and Emanuele Crialese in which white characters welcome new arrivals. I also consider two works which attend more closely to the experience of people trying to reach Europe, their dangerous journeys and the problems that await them: Senegalese director Moussa Touré's La Pirogue (2012) and American Italian Jonas Carpignano's feature debut Mediterranea (2015). In all four cases, the migrant character originates from sub-Saharan Africa.