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

Abstract

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 Rabbit Proof Fence,Le Ballon Rouge, Little Moth, and Le Havre. Surveying fictional and documentary film from the post-war years until today, the book shows how the child is a guide to themes of place, self and being in world cinema.The book addresses narratives such as the fantasy of family sanctuary, the unreliability of adults, childhood and racism, and urban ownership and inequality. It contains textual readings but also accounts of film praxis research with young people and children who have lived experience as migrants.

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