Nigerian migrants, Nollywood videos and the emergence of an ‘anti-humanitarian’ representation of migration in Italian cinema

This paper looks at migration and the politics of representation in contemporary Italian cinema by comparing one of the Nigerian videos recently produced in Italy, Akpegi Boys (2009), directed by Vincent Omoigui and Simone Sandretti, with two recent Italian films which portray the experience of Nigerian migrants in Italy, Marco and Antonio Manetti’s Torino Boys (1997), and Enrico Verra’s Sotto il Sole Nero (2004). Interestingly enough both films take, implicitly and explicitly, Nigerian videos as a narrative and aesthetic reference in order to build an innovative representation of Nigerian migrants in Italy, thus positioning themselves in an original position vis-à-vis the growing corpus of Italian films about migration emerged over the past two decades. As this paper argues, these three films allow us to identify the emergence of what could be defined as an “anti-humanitarian” representation of migration. By defining their attitude as anti-humanitarian, I do not intend to mean that these films assume a negative or derogatory perspective on migration. On the contrary, what I intend to highlight is that these are films that, by using a number of specific narrative and aesthetic strategies such as, among others, the reference to Nollywood commercial and exploitation filmmaking style, make an attempt to go beyond the binary representation that much debate on migration in Italy implicitly embraces, a representation according to which the migrant is either seen as an invader or as a victim.
By playing with cultural references that belong to the contemporary cultural universe of Nigerian migrants themselves, these films suggest the possibility of building a bridge between the diverging ways in which Italians and (in this case Nigerian) migrants look at migration. This encounter has the potential of helping Italian directors and intellectuals in deconstructing their hegemonic gaze on migrants and migration phenomena, and has the possibility to inaugurate an healthy as much as needed process of decentralization and provincialization of singularly “Italian” perspectives on migration in Italy.