Dreaming of home: migrant spaces in Felicia's Journey

Abstract

Hamid Naficy's analysis of migrant cinema focuses on the varying relationships to the home-space within émigré films, shifting between outward-looking journeys of aspiration and imaginative returns to the lost homeland. The central narrative concern in such films is the search for a space in which to belong. Felicia's Journey depicts a young girl's migration from Ireland to the Midlands of England in search of the home that she fantasises finding with her former lover and father of her unborn child. Her encounter with the psychopath Hilditch brings the question of home-founding to the fore and reveals the fantasy and distortions of memory which underpin all constructions of home.

Keywords:

• migrant cinema
• home-space
• Hamid Naficy
• road movie

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was made possible by funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS).

Notes

 1. McIlroy, ‘Exodus, Arrival and Return’, 69–77.

 2. George, The Politics of Home, 3.

 3. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 11–17.

 4. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 33.

 5. Wilson, Atom Egoyan, 114.

 6. Mazierska and Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe, 186–91.

 7. Laderman, Driving Visions, 2.

 8. Wood, Hollywood, 227–8.

 9. McBride, Ireland into Film, 41.

10. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 152.

11. Egoyan, Felicia's Journey, DVD commentary.

12. Egoyan, Felicia's Journey, DVD commentary, 151.

13. Gruben, Look But Don't Touch, 249.

14. Egoyan, Felicia's Journey, DVD commentary.

15. Egoyan, Felicia's Journey, DVD commentary, 251.

16. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 180.

17. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 12.

18. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 156.

19. Naficy, An Accented Cinema

20. Del Río-Álvaro, ‘William Trevor's Felicia's Journey’.

21. Tracy, ‘Atom Egoyan's Journey’, 17.

22. Tracy, ‘Atom Egoyan's Journey’, 15.

23. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 155.

24. Peters, ‘Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora’, 39.