Diasporic proximities: spaces of ‘home’ in European documentary

Abstract

This essay explores the relation between the genre of experimental observational documentary and transnational European spaces. It engages with documentaries that focus on the everyday and the uneventful, and that present alternative representations of liminal places and subjects. The three films analysed are: El Cielo Gira (The Sky Turns) by Mercedes Álvarez (2004, Spain), Lift by Marc Isaacs (2001, UK) and Sacro GRA by Gianfranco Rosi (2013, Italy). These documentaries are situated in the debate on observational cinema. The article argues that these films enable the recognition of a collective European temporality and spatiality, where migrants and diasporic subjects are not alien or ‘strangers’, but are part of the fabric of Europe; they are always already here. Through a study of the films, in their specific framing and editing strategies, the article argues that they open alternative spaces of encounter with other subjectivities. The original notion of affective proximities is presented to account for the political dimension of the films. The focus is on what these films can do: their political potential to affecting alternative imaginaries of the everyday lived space of European diasporic subjects, and performing and making sense of the affective reality of transnational movements and encounters.