There's No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema

Description

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The Wizard of Oz brought many now-iconic tropes into popular culture: the yellow brick road, ruby slippers and Oz. But this book begins with Dorothy and her legacy as an archetypal touchstone in cinema for the child journeying far from home. In There's No Place Like Home, distinguished film scholar Stephanie Hemelryk Donald offers a fresh interpretation of the migrant child as a recurring figure in world cinema. Displaced or placeless children, and the idea of childhood itself, are vehicles to examine migration and cosmopolitanism in films such as Le Ballon Rouge, Little Moth and Le Havre. Surveying fictional and documentary film from the post-war years until today, the author shows how the child is a guide to themes of place, self and being in world cinema.

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is Professor of Film at Monash University Malaysia and Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences. Since 2018 she has worked in the Justice, Arts and Migration Network (Lincoln-Sydney-Hong Kong) on artivist interventions that highlight state injustices against people, including children, on migrant journeys. This work was made possible by Natasha Davis (The Big Walk: It Takes a Decade, 2020), Hoda Afshar (Remain / There's No Place Like Home, 2019), the SYMAAG, Maison de Femmes, and Right to Remain organisers in Dunquerque, Manchester, and Sheffield, and the curators at Mansions of the Future (Lincoln 2018-2020).

A deeply felt, compassionate, necessary book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * W.W. Dixon, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, CHOICE *