The battle of truth and fiction: Documentary storytelling and Middle Eastern refugee discourse

ABSTRACT

This article problematizes cinematic representations of refugees in documentary film, with a particular focus on documentary depictions of Middle Eastern refugees and the ethical aspects of such representations. It argues that documentary production about Middle Eastern refugees faces two challenges simultaneously: the representational challenges of refugee documentary as a genre, with its potential for exploitation, sensationalism and emotional manipulation; and the orientalist tradition that continues to influence much of the discourse about the Middle East. Two documentary films are discussed as case studies: James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, which illustrates a number of typical, recurring aspects of orientalist representational discourse in Middle East-focused western documentary film-making; and Matthew Firpo’s Refuge: Human Studies from the Refugee Crisis, which highlights the problematic phenomenon of the singular “Syrian Refugee” image, a persistent media construction since the beginning of the European refugee crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary film
• refugee representation
• Middle Eastern refugees
• Iraq in Fragments
• orientalism in film
• ethics and documentary film

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use a number of descriptions from the New York Times review of the film by A.O. Scott (2006), but these and similar adjectives were widely applied to Iraq in Fragments by many other film critics representing various media outlets.

2. I offer a literal translation of the Arabic original: “Kelmeh laji’ hiyeh sa’abeh, sa’abeh ala n-nafas. Kelmeh laji’ ya’ni ente l-insan lid-darajah talteh, rabi’eh, khamseh, ma ba’rif shu ba’illak … Sa’ab, kan sa’ab” (Firpo 2016).

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Valerie Anishchenkova

Valerie Anishchenkova is associate professor of Arabic Studies and Core Faculty in Film Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She is the author of Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture (2014). Her current research interests focus on the relationship between cultural and individual identity and new media, including cinema, television and digital culture. Her most recent project interrogates cultural discourses on war in the last 30 years in the Middle East, the US and Russia.