The Concepts of Immigration in the Films District 9, Behemoth, Black Girl, and Tangerinev

Immigration and Film
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Immigration and Film
Films have been one of the most popular tools of entertainment, and also medium to highlight issues, like immigration. This tool has been effectively used to highlight immigrant issues and what happens to those seeking life abroad, outside their native lands. It has been a medium to inform, highlight and call to action, the viewers on a given topic. The film has been very effective in changing opinions, perceptions and views over sensitive topical issues and themes like immigration. This paper sets out to analyse some of the films and how they portray, approach and tackle the concepts of immigration.
The first film is District 9 movie, directed by Neil Bootcamp. Produced in 2009, its plot set is in Johannesburg, where an extra-terrestrial spaceship, with a million malnourished aliens, who are then relocated into a camp in Johannesburg to begin a new life on earth. Unrests then ensue a year later, between aliens and the locals. The movie brings pout the concepts of identity, difference, continuity and hybridity in its set up — the concepts which I seek to explore in the movie. Identity is the fact of being who or what a person or a thing is. Identity can be in the form of appearance or cultural background. Cultural identity is one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self', hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves', which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common ( Hall,223). It comes out in a number ways in the movie. The first instance is when the extra-terrestrial spaceship land in Johannesburg and locals are fazed on its inhabitants. The aliens also are put in a camp, singularly compromising of fellow aliens, and are not mixed with the humans. This is because they could only identify and coexist with their kind at that time. When the government tries to relocate them to another location, one of the confined aliens named Christopher Johnson tries to escape with his son and return home, Christopher does not identify with the earth, which is not the real ‘home’ to him, and his child. The other concept coming out in District 9 is continuity. Continuity is the unbroken and consistent existence or the life of something over time. Both the aliens and humans in Johannesburg feel threatened by each other’s presence in one locality. Their continuity is put under an instant danger, and this leads to a severe conflict when both humans and the aliens start to defend themselves from the other. The difference is another concept we see in the film. The difference is the act of not being similar, or dissimilar from an entity or a person. This usually determined how to relate to or are related by the other persons we feel different from. Aliens and humans are two different species of an organism who do not have any biological and physical similarities, whatsoever. Rounding up of the aliens, who found themselves in a culture they are no similar to is the first instance of difference. Difference technically challenges the fixed binaries of existence. These binaries, which stabilize meaning and representation once a challenge, they portray how incomplete coexistence is (Hall, 229).Final ...