Borders and migration in Urszula Antoniak’s Pomiędzy słowami/Beyond Words (2017)

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the feature films of the Polish Dutch filmmaker Urszula Antoniak through the lens of border and migration studies. I argue that Antoniak’s films are characterized by an aesthetic of migration that visualizes the radical identity formation of both her migrant and non-(im)migrant figures. Antoniak’s fourth film Pomiędzy słowami/Beyond Words (2017) challenges the presumptions that underlie her own aesthetic of migration by situating her characters explicitly in the geo-political, legal, and social contexts that make radical self-regeneration possible for some and not for others. In the end, the migrants in Beyond Words remain metonyms for the redefinition of the self that is possible due to the experience of migration; however, they also recalibrate that redefinition to include community, the evasion or abdication of hegemonic oversight, as well as a new conception of what it means to be a migrant or ‘native’.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• film aesthetics
• borders
• transnational cinema
• European cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Gierszał and Antoniak (2018) explain that Canadian viewers were concerned with the question whether Micha (played by Jakub Gierszał) was a racist, whereas viewers in Poland were agitated that Micha was unpatriotic and seemed to be ashamed of Poland.

2. All translations mine unless otherwise noted.

3. A note on the terms: Marian of Code Blue is a migratory if not nomadic character; her wanderings, however, do not take her beyond the borders of the Netherlands. I use the term ‘migrant’ for Antoniak’s non-autochthonous characters because all have experienced migration, whereas only some are, by definition, immigrants. My frequent use of the term ‘autochthon’ for non-immigrant characters serves as a reference to the division in Dutch that exists between autochtoon and the recently publicly problematized allochtoon. Above all, however, my interest in defining Antoniak’s characters lies in their (lack of) experiences with migration.

4. It warrants mention that my use of these first two terms, as well as the definitions of aesthetics quoted above, have been much influenced and by the collection Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (2017)—though these terms do not originate with this volume. See also Rosello and Wolfe 2017 , 1–2 in the Border Aesthetics volume.

5. A report by the Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg states that there were 58,020 Poles residing in Berlin as of 31 December 2018 (18). Poles, therefore, accounted for 7.7% of all foreigners residing in Berlin (total: 749,472).