Italian Filmmakers With Migration Backgrounds Engaging in Intercultural Understanding

This essay explores how Italian cinema engages with contemporary Mediterranean migration through the lens of filmmakers with migratory backgrounds, focusing on Anywhere Anytime (Milad Tangshir, 2024) and Maka (Elia Moutamid, 2023). Both films contribute to an emergent cinematic discourse that challenges dominant media narratives and proposes counter-representations of migration and Otherness. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s (1996/2001) notion of “mediascapes” and theories of cultural identity as a relational process, the paper highlights how these works can foster symbolic renegotiations of belonging and intercultural understanding. Despite differing in form and tone, both films employ aesthetic strategies that may enable a shift in perspective. They reflect on the traditional ethnocentric frame and foreground the agency of those who have historically and culturally been rendered voiceless. By positioning the migrant subject as narrative centre and active producer of meaning, these works articulate new imaginaries that challenge dynamics of structural symbolic violence and suggest a more inclusive, dialogic visual culture in the context of global mobility.