Private Stories, Public Issues: Representations of Migration in Angus Macqueen’s The Last Peasants. Journeys

• Main Author: Gabriela-Iuliana COLIPCĂ-CIOBANU
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Casa Cărții de Știință 2018-12-01
• Series: Cultural Intertexts
• Subjects: documentary; illegal migration; home/west; identity; imagology
• Online Access: http://files.cultural-intertexts.webnode.com/200000326-cd72dcd730/45-72%20Colipca-Ciobanu%20-%20Private%20Stories,%20Public%20Issues%20%E2%80%93%20Representations%20of%20Migration%20in%20Angus%20Macqueen%E2%80%99s%20The%20Last%20Peasants.%20Journeys.pdf
• ISSN: 2393-0624; 2393-1078

The documentary trilogy The Last Peasants (2003), directed and produced by Angus Macqueen, seeks to reveal the „private stories‟ behind Romanians‟ illegal migration to Western Europe against the background of major transformations in the post-Communist Romanian society still in transition at the turn of the twenty-first century. The paper focuses on one of the films of the trilogy, Journeys, which is the most explicit in its representation of the dangers that Romanian migrants had to face, prior to Romania‟s joining the European Union, while crossing borders to „go West‟ in hope of living their „Western European dream‟. The exploration of the rhetorical and narrative strategies employed by the British director in this filmic text aims, therefore, at casting light on how images of the sending Romanian society, the Western European hosts and the Romanian diaspora are constructed, in an attempt to challenge the audiences and to raise their awareness of the need for a better understanding of such a complex social phenomenon as migration, as well as for the change in attitudes in host-migrant interactions.