Title of Deliverable:Thematic Report “National Identity and the Media” (WP4)Due date of Deliverable: July 2010 Project coordinator:        Panteion University (UPSPS) Partners:        International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR)         University of Cyprus (UCY)         Universita di Bologna (UNIBO)         ‘Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati (UDJG)         Concorci Institut d’ Infancia I Mon Urba (CIIMU)         “Euro-Balkan” Institute (EU-BAL)         Bilkent University (BILKENT-U) Project no. 216065 Thematic Area: Cultural Interactions and Multiculturalism in European Societies Start date of Project: February 2008 Duration: 3 years Dissemination Level     PU  Public X     PP  Restricted to other programme participants     RE  Restricted to a group specified by the concortium     Co  Confidential WP 4 coordinator: “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galați (UDJG), Romania Research Teams: Romania: UDJG Main researchers: Film: Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă Ioana Ivan-Mohor Michaela Praisler Written press: Simona Antofi Gabriela Dima Antoanela Marta Dumitrașcu Mariana Neagu Greece: UPSPS Main researchers: Film : Maria Paradeisi Written press: Ioanna Vovou FYROM: EU-BAL Main researchers: Film : Slavcho Dimitrov Written press: Jana Lozanoska Table of Contents Media texts play a significant part in shaping up national perception and representation, as well as identity (re)construction. The research carried out within the framework of WP4 has focused on subjectivity-ruled productions of contemporary media with a view to investigating the extent to which they function as communication/manipulation tools in the context of broader social phenomena like migration (creating, enforcing, or, on the contrary, challenging auto- and hetero-images in the process of intercultural and gender-defined interaction). As such, the WP4 research has been oriented towards: a) identifying in the selected corpora major lines of self/other encounter representation; b) studying more in-depth the mechanisms underlying the cultural dynamics that they are illustrative of, with the hope of eventually drawing attention upon the need to better appreciate the benefits of mobility and cultural diversity in present-day Europe.   From the wide range of texts currently available on the (inter)national media market, the researchers of the three national teams – UDJG, UPSPS, and EU-BAL – unanimously decided to focus on (feature and documentary) films and written press, with a view to delineating: the larger (social/ political/ cultural) context in which filmic and journalistic texts were produced; the (non-)stereotypical representation patterns used in filmic and journalistic texts in addressing gender and migration-related issues, which could contribute either to legitimising existing power hierarchies and inequalities or to challenging them; the mechanisms involved in the dialectical process of identity formation manifest in auto- and hetero-images, which could influence the audiences and, implicitly, the public policies that could be implemented in order to make media representations more sensitive to gender and cultural encounter issues. Hopefully, the thorough study of the filmic and journalistic representations of migration, gender and intercultural relations could eventually reveal those aspects of media discourse on identity and alterity that need to be carefully reconsidered and renegotiated for the subsequent improvement of representation policies in the sense of promoting intercultural dialogue and a positive perception of cultural diversity and mobility.       The choice of the main media text types for analysis directly determined the selection of relevant methodological approaches. Thus, surveying some of the most recent and significant publications in the fields of cultural studies, filmic and journalistic discourse studies, on the one hand, and of gender, migration and national/cultural identity, on the other hand, the researchers of the three national teams eventually decided in favour of three major analytical frames, namely imagology, textual analysis of film, and critical discourse analysis (CDA), in order to provide the theoretical background necessary for the analysis of representations of gendered and/or cultural identities.   Based on the self/other dichotomy, imagology facilitates the identification and understanding of the structure of auto- and hetero-images, as expressions of different perceptions of national/ethnic/racial/cultural characters and identities, and contributes to demonstrating their conventional nature, by focusing on the intersection between linguistic (aesthetic/rhetorical) and historical (ideological/socio-cultural) aspects of discourse. (Moyle, 2004: 4) Combined with the textual analysis of film (concerned with aspects pertaining to genre and audience, narrative, film language and representation, but also to historical and institutional factors as well as to the socio-cultural context), it has helped the WP4 researchers to emphasise how positive and/or negative stereotypes, roles, attitudes are reproduced or reacted against in filmic representations of gender and intercultural relations.   As for critical discourse analysis (CDA), based on the assumption that “language [is] a social practice” (Faiclough and Wodak, 2006: 258) that can never be neutral, it “primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text (…) in the social and political context” (van Dijk, 2003: 352). That may account for WP4 researchers opting for it in order to point out the diverse ways in which power relations and social/gender inequalities are represented at the level of the written press discourse, and to ultimately raise awareness of the causal effects of the power-language relations, i.e., of the changes they bring in people (beliefs, attitudes, values, etc.), actions, social relations, and the material world (Fairclough, 2003: 8). (For more details on the methodological framework, see WP4 Research Design, 2009) As previously mentioned, all three national teams that carried out research within the framework of WP4, focusing on media representations of national identity in a context in which gender, migration and cultural differences intersect, selected their corpora according to the three main criteria, namely: public impact, availability, and relevance for the broad thematic and national-specific patterns of representation. Thus, from the earliest phase of the WP4 timeframe, the teams agreed upon restraining the scope of media texts for analysis to the two major categories of films and written press articles as such texts have the advantage of being widely spread and, therefore, very influential in (re)shaping attitudes towards and patterns of representation of the self and the gender and/or cultural other. Later phases of WP4 brought about further refinement of the examined corpora on account of their relevance for the dominant and mainstream conceptualizations about gender and migration as well as for challenging patterns of identity construction at the (cross-)national level. Consequently, the analysed filmic and journalistic texts were selected so as to accurately reflect the specificity of migration trends in each national context: Romania mainly as a migrant-sending society (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 6-9), Greece as a migrant-receiving society (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 4), and Macedonia as a sending country that, nonetheless, evolves into a transit and receiving country, especially for victims of human trafficking (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 7-9). Recent developments in national-specific migration trends were actually considered of utmost importance given their inherent consequences on the intersectional process of identity-building, by the overlapping of different – gender and culture-related – experiences of otherness, and on the perspectives from which it is represented in the media discourse. Ultimately, given the impressive number and variety of filmic and journalistic texts reflecting upon gender, migration and intercultural interactions in each of the national spaces under discussion, the corpus selection was significantly determined by the availability of the material relevant for the WP4 research purposes. Restrained access to certain texts actually turned out to be, in several cases, a serious impediment to further enlarging the range of analysed texts and to covering more varied, more or less stereotypical representations of identity and alterity.     To be more specific, each national case has been carefully constructed so as to enclose films – both feature and documentary films – and articles from the national press making, more or less explicitly, reference to the changes that, mainly after 1989-1990, have determined new trends in the development of the societies under discussion and, implicitly, in the evolution of their specific patterns of thought, behaviour, and representation.   Observing the main lines for corpus selection as priorly agreed upon with the partners, the Romanian team took interest in feature films and documentaries produced between 1990 and 2009, that were considered relevant for the dominant emigration trends after the fall of the communist regime in 1989 and that were available on the film market at the moment when WP4 research was carried out. As a matter of fact, availability turned out to be a critical issue for the Romanian team especially when it came to accessing documentaries: The still limited circulation/broadcasting of documentary films in Romania caused the members of the team to contact, in order to get free access to the documentaries of their choice, the organisers of by far the greatest festival of documentary film in Romania, i.e. Astra Film Festival.  See the website of the festival: http://www.astrafilm.ro/ With the help of its representatives to whom the members of the UDJG team are deeply indebted, a data base of contact addresses of both Romanian and foreign documentary directors, who showed interest in migration and gender-related issues, was created. Unfortunately, only some of the foreign directors chose to reply to the request for collaboration and kindly provided copies of the selected films. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 9)   Thus, the corpus of the Romanian team is made of fifteen films (eight feature films and seven documentaries), selected on account of their allowing for the study of Romanian migrants’ identity seen from the perspective of both the sending (Romanian) and the receiving societies. To be more specific, six Romanian feature films – Weekend cu mama (Weekend with my Mother, 2009) – WM, Schimb valutar (Exchange, 2008) – E, Legiunea străină (The Foreign Legion, 2008) – FL, Italiencele (The Italian Women, 2004) – IW, Occident (Occident, 2002) – O, and Asfalt Tango (Asphalt Tango, 1996) – AT – provided the ground for the investigation of the major lines along which Romanian migrants, in general, and Romanian migrant women, in particular, have been perceived in the context of the Romanian society in transition in which emigration and gender equality have gradually emerged as very sensitive issues. To complete then the larger picture of identity (re)shaping at the encounter with new cultural spaces, some international productions available on the film market, focusing on images of Romanian (women) migrants, – like Il Resto della Notte (The Rest of the Night, 2008) - RN, and Je vous trouve très beau (I Find You Very Nice, 2005) – TB – were also taken into account.   The analysis of documentary films was also originally intended to result in the examination in the mirror of home and host representations of the complex gender and cultural interactions in which Romanian migrants are constantly entangled. Nonetheless, lack of access to the initially selected Romanian productions (owing to the aforementioned difficulties encountered in the communication with the directors) eventually caused the Romanian team to work exclusively on international productions – among the most prestigious, it is true, like Beyond the Forest (2007) – BF, Stella (2006) – S, Leaving Transylvania (2006) – LT, Inhuman Traffic (2005) – IT, The Last Peasants. Journeys (2003) – J, The Last Peasants. Temptation (2003) – T, and The Last Peasants. A Good Wife (2003) – GW – reflecting on different aspects of migration from Romania (labour migration, ethnic minority migration, human trafficking), on the factors that triggered it, as well as on its consequences for the Romanian migrants’ sense of national identity. Similarly structured so as to include both feature and documentary films, the corpus selected by the Greek team consists exclusively of Greek productions of the period 1990-2008 during which the status of Greece as a receiving country was definitely established. Originally intending to cover a wider range of films (up to twenty one), the Greek team also encountered difficulties in getting access to certain productions, hence, the corpus ultimately analysed includes seventeen films, whether short (five, out of which four fiction films and one documentary), medium (one documentary) or full-length (eleven, out of which seven feature films and four documentaries). The eleven features films – Partners (2008) – P, When Fish Fly (2008) – FF, Diorthosi (Correction, 2007) – C, To Perasma (The Passage, 2006) – TP, Omiros (Hostage, 2005) – H, Lioubi (2005) – L, To katoi (The Kennel, 2002) – K, Enas lamberos ilios (A Bright Shining Sun, 2000) – BSS, Apo tin akri tis polis (From the Edge of the City, 1998) – EC, Mirupafshim (1997) – M, and Ap’ to hioni (From the Snow, 1993) - FS – and the six documentaries – Iketes (Supplicants, 2006) – S, Sugar Town – I gampri (Sugar Town, 2006) – ST, O dromos pros ti Dysi (The Way to the West, 2003) – WE, Yparhoun Liontaria stin Ellada? (Do Lions Exist in Greece?, 2003) – LEG, Klisti Dromi (Roadlocks, 2000) – R, and Ishmael (1994) - I – focus on the hardships of migrants’ life in Greece that arise from their otherness, whether defined in cultural and/or gendered terms.   “The non-commercial character of the productions explains the directors’ positive attitude towards foreign immigrants and the existence of documentaries which refer to the absence of any reception institution, if not the persecution and the inhumane behaviour against illegal immigrants.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 5) Moreover, most interestingly, far from foregrounding a unilateral view on migration and gender-related issues, the selected corpus allows for the study of representations of the migrants’ identity as seen from an ingroup perspective by migrant directors like the Ukrainian Irina Boiko and the Albanian Bujar Alimani, thus encouraging a more nuanced discussion of the migrant – receiving society interaction.   Taking into account the not very long history of FYROM cinema (“‘born’ in 1947 with the establishment of Vardar Film” - WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 2) as well as the relatively little number of films produced over the period 1989–2009 that could be relevant for the research goals of WP4 by tackling issues of gender and national identity in the context of migration, the FYROM team had to limit its corpus to four major productions, two feature films (Across the Lake, 1997 - AL and Before the Rain, 1994 - BR) and two documentaries (Cash and Marry, 2009 - CM and The Shutka Book of Records: The Champions of Shutka, 2005 - CS). While the two feature films AL and BR and the 2009 documentary CM explicitly address migration, identity, gender and self/other representation patterns emerging in an intersectional framework, the 2005 documentary CS, though indirectly touching upon migration, was considered representative particularly for its thought-provoking approach to and problematisation of ethnic (Roma) and gender difference representation. All highly regarded at international film festivals and of significant impact on “the FYROM artistic, cinematic and public/cultural context” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 3), the four films have been considered all the more interesting and relevant since they were directed by FYROM directors who spent most of their lives as migrants (either to complete their education in film studies, or to work as professional directors in western countries) and they were the result of international collaborative projects (co-productions); thus, they espouse in a challenging manner the perspectives on the tackled issues of both the sending and the receiving countries, to the point that the distinction between them becomes, more often than not, difficult to make.   As it was the case with the film corpus, the Romanian team selected the written press samples for analysis “so as to reflect both intra- and inter-group discourse characteristics, concerning both self- and other-presentation.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 17) Unlike the film corpus, however, the written press one covered, for objective reasons (i.e., availability of archives and reasonable amount of samples for analysis), a shorter span of time, namely the period 2007-2009, marked not only by major changes in Romanian emigration trends but also by increased tensions between the Romanian migrants and their host societies (for example, in Italy) due to crisis-engendering events.   To be more specific, interest was taken in articles published between 2007 and 2009 in “two of the most popular and influential high-quality newspapers of the post-communist Romania, namely, i.e., Adevărul and Cotidianul.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 17) The somewhat different (though actually not very clear) ideological orientations of these two quality Romanian newspapers – rather left-wing in the case of Adevărul (despite its recent change in ownership that would effect a shift to the right wing perspective – see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 16-17), and mostly right-wing in the case of Cotidianul – have turned out of great importance in the analysis of the corpus, partly accounting for the differences in focus and tone (towards a socially-oriented agenda with Adevărul and a politically-oriented one with Cotidianul) in presenting migration-related events (and not only). In both Romanian newspapers, the articles covering different aspects of migration seem to fall, broadly speaking, into two main categories: on the one hand, there are articles that comment on labour migration (more often than not, with a stress on the emergence of a new stereotype of the Romanian labour migrant, i.e., the ‘strawberry picker’) and its effects (mostly) at home, but also in the host society; on the other hand, there are articles that more explicitly place migration in a security-related framework, associating it with crime. In this latter category, special reference is made to “a specific crisis-engendering event that brought about increased tension between the Romanian migrants and the Italian host community, i.e. the crime committed by the Romanian migrant Nicolae Mailat against the Italian Giovanna Reggiani” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 18). It is precisely for the analysis of the changes in perspective, attitudes and stereotypes caused by such moments of crisis between the migrants and the receiving societies that the Romanian team chose to enlarge its corpus by considering, for contrastive purposes, the representations of identity and alterity foregrounded not only by the two Romanian newspapers, but also by the Italian sources (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Rainews 24, ANSA) their journalists used in writing about the events.   All in all, the Romanian team’s corpus developed from 73 articles (51 articles on labour migration and 22 articles on migration and crime, with special reference to the Mailat case), at an early stage of research, to a substantial number of articles from the two Romanian quality newspapers amounting, eventually, to: “Adevărul : 2007 – 369 articles, 2008 – 365 articles, 2009 – 38 articles  This small number of articles is due to the fact that there have been changes in the electronic archive of Adevărul which prevented the Romanian researchers from accessing all the articles on migration-related topics published in 2009.  ; Cotidianul: 2007 – 76 articles, 2008 – 287 articles, 2009 – 338 articles.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 19)   The articles were accessed partly in hard copy, but mostly electronically (in the online newspaper archives). In the case of Adevărul, a particularly valuable source was also the online version of the newspaper meant for the Romanian diaspora in Italy, www.adevărul.it. Starting usually from the headlines to focus then on other relevant structural elements of the articles, the critical discourse analysis of the selected corpus was carried out along dichotomic coordinates – “home/host; Romanian/Roma; male/female; labour and culture/crime” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 20) – with a view to delineating the ways in which cultural, ethnic and gender identities, differences, conflicts and inequalities are expressed and reproduced or challenged at the level of the journalistic text. Special stress was laid, in this context, on traces of interdiscursivity and intertextuality, most obvious in the comparative study of articles from the two Romanian newspapers and 78 articles from the Italian press (Corriere della Sera – 5 articles from 1-2 November 2007; La Repubblica – 61 articles from 1 November 2007 - 14 October 2009, Rainews 24 – 7 articles from 4 November 2007 - 9 July 2009, and ANSA – 5 articles from 13 May 2009 - 9 July 2009) used as sources by the Romanian journalists reporting on the crisis-engendering Mailat case and its subsequent echoes in the relations between the Romanian diaspora and the Italian host society.   Covering the same time span, i.e., 2007-2009, the corpus analysed by the representative of Greek team was selected, broadly speaking, according to the same main criteria as that of the Romanian one, in the sense that the main sources were represented by national quality newspapers of different ideological orientations, and the availability of the archives played an important part in the process of corpus selection. Thus, Greek researcher initially opted for Eleytherotypia (a daily “covering a wide left centred part of the public/political sphere”) and Eleytheros Typos (“characterised by its right centred position”). However, the corpus had to be readjusted during the research as Eleytheros Typos “closed and during a period of uncertainty regarding its future, its archives were no longer accessible. For that reason, the newspaper Eleytheros Typos was limited to the analysis of a major case study on a specific event dealing with labour migration, social rights and gender” and a third newspaper Kathimerini (“appealing to a right centred conservative wing”) was included in the corpus. (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 5-6) Another similarity between the Romanian and the Greek corpus is given by their sharing interest in both ‘ordinary’ journalistic discourse on (labour) migration in general and the journalistic approach to critical events of a significant impact on the relations between the migrant communities and the host society. In this respect, the Greek team chose to focus, on the one hand, on “two months (May and November) for a period of three years (2007, 2008 and 2009) for the newspapers Eleytherotypia and Kathimerini”, the number of articles examined rising up to 61 articles from Eleytherotypia and 36 articles from Kathimerini. On the other hand, their intention of studying “how discourse representations about migration, gender and national identity are negotiated around a specific event” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 6) determined them to collect data from 25 articles from Eleytheros Typos and 54 articles from Eleytherotypia (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 27) published in December 2008 and January 2009 on “the attack against the life of a Bulgarian female worker, Konstantina Kouneva, conducted with great atrocity and violence on December 2008” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 6).        Significantly determined by the specificity of the national case, the FYROM team’s corpus was selected from national newspapers (Dnevnik and Nova Makedonija) so as to cover the same period of time (2007-2009), but with reference to only one prominent migration trend in which cultural, ethnic and gender differences intersect, namely trafficking in women. The reasons why the analysis was limited to the study of this topic are explained in the FYROM National Case Study: Typical migration for economic reasons as generally understood and existing in European Union Countries is not evident in the Republic of Macedonia. (Centre for Research and Policy Making, 2007) Therefore, the focus is placed on trafficking as an illegal form of migration. The reason why trafficking in women is chosen in exploring media representations is also that, in the printed media, one can find a certain number of articles referring to trafficking in correlation with gender and national identity. This is, however, not the case with topics dealing purely with migration as such. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 23)     Just like the other two national teams, the FYROM one faced availability problems with important consequences for the selection of the corpus. Thus, at an initial stage of the research, interest was also taken in Albanian newspapers like Lajm and Koha; however, they could not be eventually included in the corpus “due to the lack of both, physical and electronic archive, particularly related to the analysed period of 2007-2009” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 6). Therefore, the corpus was selected from FYROM newspapers of different ideological orientations, namely Dnevnik (a pro-liberal daily of left-wing orientation) and Nova Makedonija (“one of the newspapers that favour the ruling party and the government in general”) (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 6). (As in the Romanian case, the ideological orientation of the newspapers seems all the more significant as they claim independence from political pressure, while actually lacking transparency.) Placing its research against the background of a larger research frame focused on representations of human trafficking in the media (See the Report on the monitoring of the media coverage of human trafficking issues in Macedonia carried out by the FYROM Institute for Media – WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 6), the FYROM researcher tried thus to justify the validity of her choice as well as the relatively small number of articles available for analysis, namely: 14 articles (of various types) from Dnevnik and 7 (standard) articles from Nova Makedonija, all published in the criminal section. This narrow-scope corpus is, in fact, the result of the refinement of the material published by the two newspapers on the subject of trafficking so that the articles referring mainly to police actions and raids, criminal proceedings undertaken by the authorities to combat trafficking, etc. were paid less attention in favour of those “deal[ing] with victims of trafficking, their portrayal, those that emphasize the national identity of the victims (i.e. Srbinka, Bugarka, etc.), as well as those that underline the inter-ethnic identity and mostly those that talk about trafficking from the perspective of sexual exploitation/prostitution.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 7) The critical discourse analysis of the above mentioned material focused on the subject and the content of the articles, as well as on their titles and accompanying photos. All three national teams carried out their research along two major lines which will be reflected in the structure of the present synthesis report. Thus, the comments on the selected corpus were organised so as to allow a smooth passage from representations, in more general terms, of migration (with special stress on cases in which the culturally-determined otherness of the migrants is doubled by ethnic differences with a significant impact on the representational patterns) to images of gender in migration (equally intersecting, in some cases, with ethnic identity, casting a different light on intercultural relations).  Moreover, the analysis aimed at considering major migration and gender-related issues from three different perspectives, namely: socio-economic realities triggering emigration but also influencing the migrants’ status in the transit and destination countries; the institutional and policy frameworks within which sending, transit and receiving societies manage the migration phenomenon; the dynamics of mental software in different cultural spaces brought into contact by migration, influencing public reactions and representations of otherness in national/ ethnic/ gender terms.   The three teams’ corpora of feature and documentary films provide, on the whole, a highly nuanced picture of the phenomenon of migration in South-East Europe, essentially structured along several major coordinates: East/West, rural/urban, communism/capitalism. The perspective from which these coordinates are reflected upon varies, however, according to the context of production, which, in most of the cases, causes a shift in stress either on the home or on the host societies’ perception of the realities of migration as a form of displacement and/or exile.         The socio-economic transformations entailed by the transition of many East European societies from communist regimes to capitalism, that, in the long run, brought about high unemployment rates, a general sense of insecurity and precarious living conditions, are explicitly pointed out as the chief causes of mostly illegal emigration in the films enclosed in the Romanian and FYROM case studies (given the two countries’ migrant-sending status), and partly in the films of the Greek case focused on migrants from Albania or from the countries of the former Soviet bloc (seen from a migrant-receiving society’s perspective or, as an exception, from within the very migrant group by a migrant director, i.e., Bujar Alimani). For most of the protagonists of the feature and documentary films of the Romanian case, which the Romanian report describes as “metonymical characters”, legal/illegal emigration is a step forward towards a better life: Luiza – in WM; Emil – in E; Mitu and Lilica, Aurel and Stelică – in FL; Maria, Victor and Ionuţ – in RN; Nicu and Nae, as well as Sorina and Mihaela – in O; the collective feminine character of the eleven Romanian girls fleeing Romania in a bus – in AT; Elena, as well as the parade of girls at the hotel trading their good looks in return of a foreign husband – in TB; Jeni and Lenuţa, the simple sisters from a backward southern Romanian village – in IW all have left, leave or dream of leaving Romania in search of a better life for themselves and those at home. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 22) The same dream is an incentive to emigration for Petru and Ion Damian (J), Mihaela Marica (GW), Laurențiu Opriș and Florica Bud (T), Stela and Marcel Margean (S) or Anna (IT), all characters of the selected documentaries. Whether Romanian or foreign productions, many of these films choose to focus on socio-economic realities of the home society that trigger the process of emigration, detailing on the characters’ successful or unsuccessful endeavours to break through social, class, ethnic, geographical and cultural barriers to pursue the ‘Western dream’. It is in this context that several particularities of the Romanian context favouring emigration surface in both the feature and documentary films analysed. Thus, the Romanian society is still shown to be essentially defined by differences in regional development, “with Bucharest, the capital, the west of the country (Timişoara and Arad) and its centre (Braşov, Sibiu, Cluj) being favoured over its northern, eastern and southern parts” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 21), as well as by an interesting dynamics of rural and urban movements, causing internal and external migration. Particular interest is shown, in this respect, in the documentaries (J, T, GW, BF, LT) and in some of the feature films (IW, FL), in the consequences of the ‘death’ of the rural culture through “colonisation by an urban ethics” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 22), engendering, more often than not, conflicts between the older and the younger generations. As for the urban spaces, they are also revealed as “conflict-ridden”, trapped between the local and the global, bearing the marks of deep fissures in the economic fabric of the Romanian society in transition, some of the side-effects of which are stressed out in the references to the problems of the medical system at home (S) or in the some middle-aged characters’ nostalgia for the communist age before 1989 (S, J).     Striking similarities with the Romanian case appear in the representations of the home societies in the FYROM and some of the Greek productions. For instance, the FYROM film BR presents the FYROM space as mostly rural but contaminated by the ‘civilising’ influences of the West, while Greek productions like I, M or K show Albania as idyllic, beautiful, but primitive, agricultural, unurbanised, which accounts for the inhabitants’ hard life that makes a visa for Greece a precious possession. Moreover, all national cases contain analeptic returns to images of a communist past when free movement across national borders was perceived as ‘dangerous’ for the integrity of the state, which made all attempts at migrating highly risky enterprises, most often ending in death/ imprisonment/ persecution. (e.g. Nicu and Nae’s perilous escape across Danube’s waters in O - WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 22; Konstantin’s painful ‘Odyssey’ through Albanian camps under the totalitarian communist regime of Enver Hodza in AL - WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 14; “the extracts and newsreels of the past in which popular uprisings are violently repressed by the authority in power” in I -  WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 8) Another common point of the three national cases is film relating socio-economic fissures in the former communist, now migrant-sending societies, with more or less severe inter-ethnic dissensions. Thus, within the Romanian case, “two of the documentaries, S and BF, deal, among other things, with the Romanian/Roma confusion and cultural myth-making prejudice, while the German ethnic minority problematics – from integration to disintegration and reintegration – is more explicitly tackled in BF and LT.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 24) However, if, in the case of Romanian Saxons, inter-ethnic conflict is represented in terms of difficulties in or (peaceful) resistance to integrating in the Romanian majority, triggering, in the long run, mass exodus towards Germany and Austria in the 1990s for reintegration into the root culture, in the Greek case, inter-ethnic conflict is shown as rather deepened by migration: Through the opposition between a ‘cold’ register of events and the emotional involvement of the viewer in FS, the ‘cinéma-vérité’ and the experimental techniques in EC, the narratives of both films present the ‘inhospitable’ reception even the immigrants of Greek descent have to face; they are always the ‘other’ no matter where they are; in Greece they are considered ‘Albanians’ or ‘Russian-Pontiacs’ and back home they are the ‘Greeks’; they float in ‘midair’ with a constant sense of not belonging, something that in itself constitutes a life at the margins of society. Interestingly enough, EC shows how, even in the world of the socially excluded, different degrees of exclusion pertain (Sasha, the central ‘Russian-Pontiac’ character reveals a sense of national consciousness which as a rule is common among people of Greek descent, distinguishing himself from the Albanian immigrants). (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 7)   Yet, by far the most violent image of migration-related inter-ethnic conflict appears in the FYROM film BR. Taking a strong critical stance towards the Albanian – FYROM clash that the three protagonists – the FYROM photographer Alexandar Kirkov, the FYROM Orthodox monk Kiril, and the Albanian girl Zamira – resist to their death, “BR, in a most paradigmatic manner, exemplifies the violence within the cultural and social space demarcated with geographical or symbolic borders, that is the intra-national/ethnic/group violence exercised over the other among ‘us the same’.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 10)   Moreover, all national cases prove a keen interest in the complexity of migration by their foregrounding representations of various migration trends. Obviously, the common ‘thread’ is provided by the economically-motivated illegal (only rarely legal) labour migration, and, to a certain extent, by ethnic minority migration. Still, several other major migration trends surface in the filmic representations such as: migration for marriage (TB and O in WP4 National Case Study – Romania; AL and CM in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM; ST in WP4 National Case Study – Greece), human trafficking (IW and IT in WP4 National Case Study – Romania; EC and RW in WP4 National Case Study – Greece), asylum seeking (WE in WP4 National Case Study – Greece). Thus, though predominantly focused on several cultural and geographical spaces known as major ‘migrant senders’ in South Eastern Europe – like Romania, Albania, the former Yugoslav countries, Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, etc. – the analysed films (with special reference to the Greek case) widen the scope of migrant figures including illegal migrants from Kurdistan and India as well as “asylum seekers who come from some of the most dangerous areas of the world like Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and China” (TP, R, S, WE - WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 7, 8-9). Nonetheless, irrespective of their countries of origin, most of the migrants are doomed to be disappointed by the Western mirage which they obstinately pursue, sometimes at the very cost of their lives (Mitu in FL – WP4 National Case Study – Romania; Ishmael in I, the three migrant Kurds in R - WP4 National Case Study – Greece).    In all three national case studies, the mirage of migrants’ destination countries as ‘promised lands’ is primarily sustained by iconographic representations of the East as mostly rural, and if urban a still highly fractured hybrid of local and global influences, as opposed to the alluring, ‘civilised’ urban West, as an expression of differences in economic development (and not only). Thus, except for TB which displays “a reversal of [the] traditional encoding [of France] as an urban space in the West-ist cultural map-making” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 22), all the feature films and especially the documentaries of the Romanian case fix the home/host opposition in the above mentioned pre-established terms.   Similarly, in films pertaining to the FYROM case like BR and CM, the directors point, on the one hand, to “the frailty of the dichotomies and binary oppositions between the East and the West […] detailed in the landscapes, people (UN officers and cars), advertising billboards (Coca Cola, Hard Rock) etc.”, while, on the other hand, illustrating – indeed, in a somewhat subversive manner – the pre-established patterns of representation of the East as rural and poor (people eating on old, wooden tables and drinking rakija, religion-influenced architecture styles and rituals, etc.) and of the West as urban and glamorous (with fancy restaurants, double-deckers, modern studios, but also rigid bureaucratic systems). (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 10, 19) As for the Greek case, isolated attempts at erasing the differences between the sending and the receiving communities like that of Bujar Alimani in K (see the image of the Greek village that Hito reaches after crossing the border as an almost perfect replica of the Albanian village that he left behind) are not enough to validly counterbalance the recurrent foregrounding of urban receiving spaces. Nonetheless, just like the FYROM directors, the Greek ones reveal the contrasts at the very heart of the ‘mirage’ and expose Athens, the epitome of the Greek urban space, as a multi-cultural city pervaded by an atmosphere of latent tension, with violent manifestations of xenophobia and nationalism in public life (e.g. “in the streets taken over by gangs, in the marches and football matches, in religion, the media, and in the everyday small talk of people”), condemning migrants and asylum seekers to social marginalisation, discrimination and a miserable life in tents and cardboards in the city slums. (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 8) Altogether, what all the representations of the Western receiving countries – whether Spain, Australia, Austria, France, Ireland, Germany, and Italy in the Romanian case study, Great Britain and Austria in the FYROM case study, and Greece in the Greek case study – suggest is that many migrants have relatively few chances of fulfilling their dream of a better life, as: they are forced to accept low-paid, unskilled jobs (in agriculture, domestic work, entertainment, different service sectors, etc.) on the black market for which they are often overqualified, they find too few opportunities for decent survival, and they become victims of discrimination, often failing in their attempts to communicate with their hosts (partly because of their not knowing the language of the receiving country, as the Greek case points out.) Under the circumstances, some decide to move on and to continue their displacement journey with the hope of finding one day a better world (e.g. R - WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 9); others put up with the hardships of a migrant’s life and try to adapt to the receiving society, being eventually more or less assimilated (e.g. WM and TB in WP4 National Case Study – Romania; LEG in WP4 National Case Study – Greece). At this point, it is perhaps worth mentioning that some of the films presenting migration from a migrant-receiving society’s perspective also point out that, in trying to make a living in the host cultural space, migrants are equally exposed to violence within their own diasporic group (e.g. RN in WP4 National Case Study – Romania and C in WP4 National Case Study – Greece). Ultimately, return home may be wished for, but reintegration in the home community is equally difficult for various reasons: the returning migrants are compelled to face the disastrous consequences of their leaving behind their loved ones (e.g. WM in WP4 National Case Study – Romania); they have to conceal the truth about the kind of life they live in the receiving countries to avoid being publicly put to shame (e.g. IW in WP4 National Case Study – Romania); they simply remain trapped between worlds, victims of alienation both at home and abroad (e.g. BR in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM). Few are the filmic examples of successful return when the migrants who decided to come back manage to start their own business at home (without becoming themselves ‘predators’ on their own ‘kind’ – see Elena in TB versus Lilica in FL in WP4 National Case Study – Romania) or discover true  love (Atanas in CM in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM). If the synthetic re-examination of the films analysed by the three teams reveals numerous common points between the film case studies, the preliminary conclusions of a contrastive approach to the written press corpora indicate less overlapping representations of migration in national newspapers. The specificity of each national case seems to have a greater impact on news reporting about migration, hence the differences in focus and perspective in each country’s dailies. Thus, the Romanian newspapers stress out the causes and consequences of emigration for the home country; even when reporting on the Romanian migrants – host community relations, they take more interest in the ways in which the former manage/fail to successfully negotiate their place in the receiving society, balancing the sending-society’s and the diasporas’ perspectives against those of the receiving society (especially in the case of Romanian emigration to Italy). In their turn, the Greek newspapers ponder on the various aspects of immigration as seen mainly through the host community’s eyes. As for the FYROM case study, its focusing on gender and migration intersections in human trafficking as a form of migration makes it more appropriate for contrastive analysis in the Gender in Migration section of this report.   Therefore, a more or less thorough investigation of the causes and consequences of emigration for the home society is explicitly found in the Romanian case study, consisting of articles selected from Adevărul and Cotidianul. Just like the Romanian films, the selected written press articles point to “low income and high unemployment rates as the top incentives to Romanian emigration, hence the most important ‘push factor’ is the wish to achieve economic well-being, which has significant social and emotional consequences.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 24) Some of the Romanian articles discuss in detail the differences in economic development and the socio-economic transformations affecting the Romanian and the other European markets, pointing to the subsequent changes in the Romanian migrant’ profile in terms of age (young/middle-aged), qualification (skilled/unskilled), native region (Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania), and country of destination (Italy, Spain, Great Britain, etc.), as well as on the procedures of legal recruitment (especially after Romania’s accession to the EU) for Romanian migrant labour force. (See WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 25)       However, unlike the films, many Romanian newspaper articles choose to focus, in more ‘objective’ terms, on the advantages and disadvantages of massive labour migration for the Romanian society. Consequently, they insist, on the one hand, on the major gain for the national economy represented by migrant remittances (despite their significant decrease from 2007-2008 to 2009 because of the economic crisis); particular stress is laid on the fact that, apart from being of great help to the migrants’ families at home, these remittances contribute, to a large extent, to improving local economy (especially with regard to the constructions and medical care sectors). (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 25-26) On the other hand, the analysed articles deplore the negative effects of massive migration for labour, with particular reference to loss of labour force at the national level and child abandonment, respectively. It is perhaps interesting to remark at this point that, while drawing attention upon brain-drain and loss of labour force at home owing to mass emigration, Romanian journalists slightly shift the stress on the failure of the Romanian government to implement successful return policies by offering well-paid jobs to the Romanian migrants who would like to come back to Romania. (As a matter of fact, as certain 2009 Adevărul and Cotidianul articles point out, the failure of such policies is all the more painful since, not even in times of crisis, when they lost their jobs abroad, do Romanian migrants accept to return home, unless forced by complete loss of revenue. – see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 27) As for child abandonment, both Romanian newspapers show much concern with the difficulties faced by what they call the ‘home-alone generation’ left behind by migrant parents. Finally, when tackling the issue of return, the two Romanian newspapers expand partly on the failure of the Romanian government to successfully implement policies that would bring many Romanian workers back home (as mentioned above), partly on the difficulties inherent in the process of re-adaptation to and reintegration in the social and economic realities of the native country (e.g. high unemployment rates, especially in the context of the economic crisis; higher costs of living; a still heavily-bureaucratic system; increase in criminality at home; etc.) that many Romanians find insurmountable, hence their decision to emigrate again. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 27-28)   Perhaps the most prominent aspect that the Romanian and the Greek cases share is the sense that migration is still largely perceived in the receiving countries as a threat to their welfare and national security. That may account for the fact that, as part of the Romanian and Greek corpora demonstrates, migrants are implicitly associated with crime, violence, and other social problems. There are, of course, tendencies to duly counterbalance negative stereotyping by positive representations of the problems that migrants actually face in the process of acculturation. Yet, what both reports seem to question is the extent to which such articles are written to actually support the migrants to succeed in changing the general opinion regarding migration. To be more specific, since the Greek case is based on the study of journalistic discourse produced exclusively from the receiving society’s perspective, it would be only fair to begin the presentation of the hosts’ image of migrants with a summary of the most important results of the Greek team’s research. In this respect, it is worth pointing out from the very beginning that both Greek dailies, Eleytherotypia and Kathimerini, display a similar attitude toward immigrants in Greece. Placing the debate on immigration to Greece in a larger European context, many of the articles published in the two newspapers propose a dialogue on migration-related issues between the academic circles, different institutions (e.g. the Migrants’ Politics Institution), associations, NGOs (e.g. Amnesty International), and the public opinion in order to draw attention upon: “the positive effects of the immigrants’ presence in Greece such as the production of wealth, the increase of the population and the invigoration of the rural regions” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 9); “the problems that the migrant population faces […], in particular regarding human rights issues, working conditions and social discrimination in the Greek society, i.e. at a national level, as well at an international one” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 9), hence the migrants’ being considered among the most vulnerable and disadvantaged social categories.   Immigrants’ positive images dominate the articles about labour migration, assessing the immigrants’ contribution to the development of local businesses and trade (praising the flexibility which helps immigrant shop owners to cope better with the economic crisis), as well as those containing personal testimonies in an attempt at making the Greek readers better appreciate the immigrants as individuals. However, what some of the personal testimonies bring to the foreground, in contradistinction to the journalists’, academics’ and researchers’ positive attitude towards migrants, is the discriminatory treatment that migrants (whether first or second generation) are subject to in the Greek society. (See WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 10-11) That this is indeed a characteristic of the Greek society is also sustained by the articles that report and stigmatise xenophobia and violence against migrants: … when analysing a complex socio-economic situation with ambivalent components - “racism and xenophobia in Greece nowadays are risky issues” (Eleytherotypia, November 14, 2007); or, when relating the mistreatment of Pakistani or other migrant groups by the police (see for example Kathimerini, May 24, 2007, Eleytherotypia, May 28, 2008), noting also the absurdity and inequality in the justice system regarding imprisonment (Kathimerini, November 9, 2008); or, again, when noting the “appearance of a young a violent extreme-right trend” and acknowledging that the terrorists’ attacks against migrants in Greece are increasing (Kathimerini, November 29, 2009). (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 11)         Interviews with Greek citizens living in conflict areas (like the Agios Panteleimonas Square) cited in some of the analysed articles, reports about “cases of blackmailing, prostitution networks or forced protection offered to stores held mostly by other migrants of the same or other groups” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 12) combine to create a picture of intolerance towards the migrant ‘other’, in which migration is presented as crime engendering, a threat to public order and security (though such crime networks develop in collaboration with Greek citizens). Reflecting from a sending society’s perspective on the status of Romanian migrants abroad, the Romanian newspapers Adevărul and Cotidianul preserve the same distinction between two major categories of topics – labour and crime – unevenly discussed according to the orientation of the newspaper and to the country of destination in question. A point worth making (though it will be fully developed in a subsequent section) is that labour-related topics regarding the socio-economic integration of Romanian migrants in the receiving society seem to be more numerous when reference is made (to consider only the most popular destinations of Romanian emigration) to Spain: This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that the crimes attributed to Romanian migrants living in Spain are approached in a more moderate manner, especially by the representatives of the host country and, on the other, to the fact that the more friendly attitude of the population living in Spain favoured lower crime rates in this EU country. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 28)     When it comes to the other favourite destination of most Romanian migrants, i.e., Italy, Romanian reports rather rarely discuss (especially in 2007-2008) the contribution of Romanian migrant workers to the economic development of the home and host countries; if they do, they bitterly remark that Romanian workforce is preferred in Italy because of their being hardworking people and because of the low salaries that Italian employers pay to them, most often outside the legal framework. (“ ‘Romeni di merda’ produc 11 miliarde de euro pe an în Italia” – “ ‘F** Romanians’ produce 11 billion euros a year for Italy”, Cotidianul, 5 November 2007; “Românii din Italia trimit anual 777 milioane de euro” – “Romanian Migrants in Italy Send Home 777 Million Euros Every Year”, Cotidianul, 31 October 2007). (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 26)   Otherwise, like their Italian peers, whom they often cite in writing their articles, Romanian journalists insist on the tensions between the Romanian migrants and the Italian community, which, against the background of incessant ‘warfare’ between the Romanian/ Roma migrants and the Italian authorities, culminated in November 2007, in the crisis caused by Nicolae Romulus Mailat’s murder of Giovanna Reggiani. That triggered a wave of violent reactions of the Italian authorities and public opinion against Romanian migrants, owing to abusive generalisations, recorded and commented upon by the Romanian and Italian newspapers alike in an increasing number of articles devoted to Romanian diaspora in Italy. Significant differences distinguish, however, the reporting style of each of the Romanian newspapers under study, on the one hand, from that of the Italian sources they quote or ‘dialogue’ with, on the other. The Romanian researchers’ case analysis seems to show that both the Romanian and the Italian newspapers start from the preconceived idea that migration and criminality go, unavoidably, hand in hand (“many Romanians’ status of legal/illegal migrants favours their criminal attitudes against the population of the host country” – WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 29); yet, what they cannot agree on is whether the attitudes and policies of the host society’s government and public opinion have contributed (or not) to the late 2007 escalation of violent crime, damaging even more the already tense relations between the Romanian and Italian communities.   There are two essential distinctions between the approaches adopted by the journalists of Adevărul and Cotidianul in reporting on the Mailat case and its consequences, both influenced by the general tone and orientation of the newspapers. Thus, “confronting their readers directly and indirectly, with both personal opinions of the people involved and of their own as mediating agents, and with official positions – quotations or full interviews – with regard to the events/people/ institutions involved” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 29), Cotidianul presents the series of debates fuelled by the Mailat case regarding the Romanian migrants in Italy taking up the main arguments presented in the Italian sources (i.e., the impact of Romanian migration on Italy’s security as a receiving country, the extreme urge to expel Romanian migrants from Italy) laying special stress on the reactions of the political circles – both Romanian and Italian – to this crisis event. It is in this context (to be further enlarged upon in a subsequent section) that the Cotidianul journalists present, tongue in cheek, the reaction of the Romanian authorities, while providing a counter-argument to public violence against Romanian migrants by quoting Italian sources that suggest that ““Italians Should Rage Against the Politicians, not Against the Immigrants” (Cotidianul, 4 November 2007 in WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 29), precisely because the Italian government failed to implement special programmes for the integration of the Roma (not only Romanian) migrants. As for Adevărul, the much larger number of articles devoted to Romanian migrants in Italy at the time of the Mailat case seems to be divided between presentations of the discriminating migration-related policies and actions of the Italian government, and more or less detailed reports of the consequences at the social level of the rising tide of xenophobia triggered by the Mailat case, i.e., “the acts of violence directed at Romanian migrants, irrespective of their legal/illegal status or ethnic origin” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 30). It is worth mentioning, however, that, though over the months that followed the Mailat case, the number of articles devoted to the Romanian-Italian tensions did not decrease, at least, not only did the Adevărul journalists keep “the record of ‘sensationalist’ criminal acts on both sides (i.e., Romanian migrants and hosts), but equally tried to counterbalance images of violence (whether physical, in the form of attacks, or verbal, in political conflicts) with positive calls for tolerance and acceptance of national differences (e.g. “Intelectualii români fac apel la rațiune față de expulzarea emigranților” – “Romanian Intellectuals Appeal to Reason in Dealing with the Migrant Expulsion Issue”, Adevărul,  20 November 2007; “Un editorialist italian ia apărarea românilor din Italia” – “Italian Editor Defends Romanian Migrants in Italy”, Adevărul,  27 November 2007.)” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 30) Finally, to refer to the Italian sources (particularly Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica), the main arguments are also divided: it is true that the dominant of their journalistic discourse is the virulent tone in which they explicitly express or only induce the idea that “most problems in Italy are often due to the migration of Romanians, and of Roma people (coming especially from Romania but also from other countries)”, therefore equating the status of a Romanian migrant with criminality; nonetheless, there are also other arguments that are worth mentioning. In an attempt at providing an answer to the question ‘what caused this crisis?’, the Italian journalists reconsider the larger context of the Mailat case to find pros and cons in the debate on Romanian emigration. Thus, next to accusatory diatribes, there are suggestions that the ‘root of all evil’ might lie somewhere else with: the Italian government that mismanaged migration-related issues and condemned Roma and Romanian migrants to a miserable life in uncivilised campsites (an argument taken up by the Romanian press as well, as previously indicated); the Italian civil society that ignored the basic reasons why Romanians migrated, i.e., Romania’ communist past and the difficult years of transition after 1989 bringing about poverty and insecurity, and that treated migrants unfairly, forcing them to face discrimination and social marginalisation (and, some articles suggest, “not all Italians agree with the social marginalization that Romanian and Roma migrants living in Rome and in other Italian cities have to face.” – WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 31); the Romanian sending society for subjecting some of its members to discrimination “conditioned by ethnic, socio-economic and cultural aspects” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 32) and for not providing enough opportunities of personal and professional fulfilment, thus forcing many Romanians to migrate to other EU states. Last but not least, though less well sustained than in the Greek press (not surprisingly especially in a crisis context), the defence of the migrants’ position by the receiving country’s press is there in rather isolated articles “written by Italian journalists [that] stress the fact that whether or not of Roma origin, many Romanian migrants living in Italy are ordinary people who strive for their families (“Ghico e i fratelli delle baracche” – “Ghicco and the Brothers of the Barracks”, La Repubblica, 3 November 2007) and who are capable of proving their humane side and strong character in critical situations in which other people might fail to react appropriately.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 32) The representations of the institutional and policy frameworks managing the various aspects of the migration phenomenon in the home and/or host societies are generally focused on one major issue, namely the illegal status of most migrants that condemns them to being perpetually “caught in a no-rights zone” (Agustín, 2005: 112). The most obviously recurrent image is that of migrants striving to make a better living, even if that means to break the law, with the hope that, one day, they would gain legal status and become legal residents/citizens of the host country. Legal and institutional frameworks of the migrant-sending country are more or less explicitly dealt with mostly in the films included in the Romanian corpus, but also, to some extent, in those belonging to the Greek and FYROM corpora. Whether feature or documentary, several productions of the Romanian corpus reveal potential migrants as rather avoiding interaction with the Romanian authorities (in the absence of a coherent labour migration policy, for many years) for various reasons: on the one hand, the feature films tend to present police as “helpless, useless, easily bribed (in E, IW and AT) or made to join the conning (in FL and O)”, i.e. to favour illegal emigration ‘business’; on the other hand, the documentaries obliquely criticise state institutions and migration policies by pointing to “the scarcity of opportunities of migrating legally within the framework of bilateral agreements or of collective labour contracts negotiated by Romanian employment agencies [which] causes those who do not have either the advanced skills required (like Florica Bud in T) or the time to wait until they could find a proper job abroad through a Romanian employment agency to assume the risks of illegal migration. (J, T, GW, IT) ”  (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 33) That may account for the fact that most of the protagonists of the analysed films become metonymical figures for the Romanian potential migrants who choose to assume the risks of illegally crossing the borders – best epitomised, in their most dangerous forms, in migrant smuggling and human trafficking – with the ‘help’ of representatives of the local underworld (E, J, T), informal networks of migrant relatives or friends (J, GW, IT, S), or mostly unreliable recruitment agencies on both sides of the Romanian border that “seize the opportunity and trade dreams at a profit” (AT, TB, O, E, FL, IW). (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 33) The only cases in which the home country’s migration-related institutional system is rehabilitated are those presenting either the legally approved Saxon minority migration (LT) or human trafficking seen not only as a form of illegal migration but also as one of intercultural violence that must be combated (IT).     Making reference to a particular trend in Romanian emigration flourishing especially in the 1990s, some of the feature films of the Romanian case draw attention upon marriage as the easiest way of legally obtaining the right to permanent residence abroad, hence the stress either on the development of marital agencies favouring this kind of migration (O, TB) or on individual choices made in this respect after living abroad for a while (WM). This interest in marriage-facilitated legalisation of the migrant’s status is actually shared by the Romanian and the FYROM case studies. However, what distinguishes the FYROM production CM is the very detailed investigation of the host society’s legal and institutional mechanisms meant to control the migrants’ access through marriage to legal status/citizenship. This documentary aims at exposing the “still highly prevalent nationalistic and xenophobic politics of citizenship in the fortress of Europe” within the frame of which the migrant continues to be seen not as an individual in search for happiness and better life conditions, but as a transgressor: This experience comprises frustrations at visa regimes, Kafkian bureaucratic and administrative labyrinths, infinitesimal legal procedures one has to go through to acquire residence permit, unequal treatment of foreigners as second or third-rate citizens etc., and, in the course of this constellation, the construction and maintenance, as collateral strategic effect of the institutional and legal system, of the status of foreigner (…). This situation unveils the paradoxical status of the foreigner in relation to the law that regulates his/her social, political, economic and citizen’s status. It is precisely through this entire administrative, legal and bureaucratic apparatus that regulates, controls, surveils and supervises the foreigner’s place, movement, work, contacts, duration of stay, interference and assemblages he creates with the natives and those from ‘his/her group’, precisely through these mechanisms that the foreigner comes to existence. (WP 4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 14) Hence, through this FYROM film, “the foreigner, the stranger poses the Question which shatters, by de-mystifying them, the limits of identity, of the national sovereignty practice over a territory where interactions and contacts are policed in order for the purity of nation to be preserved in time and the imagined emanation of the principle of national membership to be safeguarded.” (WP 4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 14) What in some of the documentaries of the Romanian case – BF and LT – is only evoked as belonging to a distant past, namely totalitarianism, military and paramilitary force-inflicted violence (e.g. in BF “the extreme communism of the Siberian labour camps or the closely knitted system of the Nazi dictatorship” – WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 34), appears to be still very much ‘alive’ in some other geographical and cultural spaces that migrants leave in search for a better life. Several films of the Greek case study (FS, I, R, S, WE) signal “the atrocities of police, military and paramilitary forces in the sending countries” (Albania, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, China) causing the risky passage of the borders to sometimes end in death (FS and R) or amputation (WE). (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 13-14) A special case among the films of the Greek case that tends to be particularly critical of the border police on both sides (of the sending and receiving countries) is H: In H police is presented on both sides of the border as scheming and ultimately unable to solve the problem of hijacking and to liberate the hostages. The Greek police tries unsuccessfully to deceive the hijacker and lets media play a dangerous game with the whole situation, while the Albanian police ‘solves’ the problem by murdering the hijacker and an innocent hostage. Interestingly enough, the Albanian police have the worst opinion of their Greek colleagues: ‘The Greeks are bastards… They shoot first, ask questions later…’ (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 13) The FYROM film AL belongs to the same category of films opposing the individual to a violent totalitarian regime, yet, by giving a universal dimension to “the motif of an individual’s transgression of the national borders’ regime”, it stands apart from the Romanian and Greek examples. (WP4 National Case Study – FYRoM, 2010: 14) In this case, again, violence is inherent in the definition of the nation, represented as a self-contained community under the totalitarian communist regime of Enver Hodza in Albania, which punishes all attempts at border transgression whether by a national ‘other’ (like the main character of the film) or by its own people who dare challenge/ betray the leading principle of purity and closed-ness.   The transgression of the border shows the monstrosity of the totalitarian and homogenizing tendencies of a political regime and its technologies to conserve the imagined principle and the purity of the unity. The transgression in this case is not acting on the borders of a collective ethnic body as much as it is experienced on the borders of a political regime coercively imposed. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 15)   The totalitarian regime is contrasted to “the love of two individuals, who despite all the misfortunes, go through an exhausting initiation process, and manage to get over it, regardless of all the consequences it will inscribe in their lives and bodies.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 15) The ultimate lesson of the film seems to be sustained by the universal dimension that the protagonists’ relationship acquires, on the one hand, and by the metaphoric connotations of the image of the lake, on the other. Paradoxically, the lake either functions as “a metaphor for the illusory megalomaniac ideological human borders, thus signifying the eternity in contrast to the ephemeral human condition” or brings, with its sunny horizon, the promise of freedom and the nostalgic longing for home of the individual trapped within oppressing (political and ideological) borders. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 15-16) If imprisonment and loss of all rights await the transgressor of the borders of a totalitarian regime, in many cases, illegal migrants and asylum seekers coming to the Western democratic ‘promised lands’ do not benefit from a very different treatment, either. Both the Romanian and the Greek case show illegal migrants (Romanian, Albanian, Kurd, etc.) as deprived of some of their essential rights (e.g. freedom of movement, medical care, etc.), putting up with violence and exploitation, leaving in constant fear of police pursuit and deportation, occasionally easy targets for police or migrant-migrant brutality. For instance, in the Romanian case study, for some of the characters of the feature films, the host countries may allow free passage but, once the destination is reached, all hopes for a better life are thwarted by deceit into human trafficking (IW), discrimination and marginalisation (RN), strict police control and imprisonment (FL). One of the most relevant symbolic images in this respect is that of Mitu in FL “who dies a terrible death in an Austrian prison while trying to escape, and whose organs are subsequently stolen” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 32). The documentaries of the Romanian case study are even more relevant for the flaws in the migration-related institutional frames of the receiving countries, which render the migrants’ ‘battle’ for work permits and citizenship an almost futile one, as they are never actually conferred. With no opportunities offered, no rights guaranteed, the illegal migrants in J, T, GW, S, IT leave in constant feat of police harassment and repatriation. Similar examples appear in numerous films of the Greek corpus. “In M and H the bodies of both Albanian characters bear the marks of police torture, while in TP the Bangladeshi immigrant, after un attack resulting in his being robbed, begs his employer, when he comes to his senses : ‘No police, please, they will send me back’.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 13) Frequent paper control puts migrants under more strain (FS, C); legality is so difficultly gained and so easily lost (H). The institutional framework of the receiving country appears, altogether, as both prone to increasing psychological pressure on the migrants and asylum seekers, and insufficiently prepared to handle their problems: In the WE the interviewed immigrants reveal the terrorising feeling of an illegal life ‘without papers’; a life of illegal births of stateless children; a life with the constant threat of the violent authorities; the inhuman conditions of the detention centres in Greece – one of them states that prison is like a hotel in comparison to them. They will also talk about the refusal of the authorities to grant them asylum, even when they cover all the necessary requirements. As a Kurd whose life was in danger says: ‘I asked for asylum and they gave me deportation’. These accounts are often accompanied by documentary footage showing immigrants in endless queues waiting to show their papers in order to get a permit to stay; police doing body search on immigrants; immigrants getting off crammed coaches at the borders and being deported.  (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 14)   Not even the migrants of Greek descent benefit from better treatment in the Greek institutions: the migrants from North Ypeiros live with the same feelings of fear of police and discrimination, and baptism is imposed on them as “one of the very few means for ‘accession’ in the Greek petit bourgeois society”; as for the Russian-Pontiacs, “the selective Greek education and the inexistence of reinforcing teaching institutions makes them abandon school, resort to unskilled labour and ultimately to male prostitution.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 14) Occasionally, the inappropriateness of the institutional and policy frameworks in the Greek receiving society is subtly pointed at by the contrast between the individual’s humane attitude and the system’s reactions to the migrants’ distress (Katerina in FS, Christos in M, the old employer in TP).   To refer again to the two perspectives – of the home and host societies – from which the actions of the institutional/legal/political systems managing migration trends and implicitly influencing the migrants’ identity re-shaping process could be looked upon, due mention must be made, from the very beginning, of the prominent differences between their representations in the written press samples of the Romanian and Greek case studies. (As previously mentioned, given its specific focus on human trafficking as a form of illegal migration and gendered violence, the FYROM case is considered for a contrastive approach only in the Gender in Migration section.) Thus, if interest is taken in representations of the home country’s migration-related institutions, legal and policy frames, the Romanian case should be particularly developed upon. To start from an overarching remark, it is important to notice that both Adevărul and Cotidianul have collaborated, over the years, with various institutions involved in monitoring the migration phenomenon in Romania, be they governmental or non-governmental, and, hence, have systematically recorded in their articles the reactions and attitudes of the representatives of these institutions towards Romanian migrants. With regard to labour migration, in general, part of the selected corpus seems to point back to the fact that the relative scarcity of state-mediated legal employment opportunities prior to 2007 was indicative of the Romanian government’s unclearly defined policies for the management of the emigration phenomenon, to be contrasted with the significant changes in this respect, after Romania’s accession to the EU, when more efficient institutional and legal instruments were implemented to encourage legal labour migration. By the time such changes occurred, however, Romanian migrant communities in many European destination countries (especially in Italy and Spain) had significantly grown, so Romanian governmental and non-governmental institutions focused their policies on either encouraging migrants’ integration in the host societies or trying to convince Romanian migrants to return home. In the first set of policies, the newspapers include: Romanian politicians’ messages to Romanian diasporas urging them to learn their hosts’ language and culture to improve thus intercultural communication, initiatives of Romanian private universities meant to provide Romanian migrants with easier access to higher education and to facilitate their status leap in the host country, or initiatives of the Romanian Orthodox Church meant to provide spiritual support to those working abroad, away from their families (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 35, 36, 37). As for the second set of policies, aimed at determining Romanian migrants to return home, the newspapers record the failure of the collaborative projects organised in this respect since the offer Romanian migrants were made did not rise up to their expectations. Under the circumstances, the Romanian government’s policies focused on the reintegration in the Romanian educational system of migrants’ children who returned home or on countering the terrible consequences of child-abandonment as one of the worst side-effects of Romanian emigration. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 35-36) Nonetheless, as the process of migrants’ integration is demanding and requires collaboration on both the migrants’ and the receiving-society’s side, the written press is expected to report on the host countries’ migration-related policies as well. As a matter of fact, that is one of the common points of the Greek and Romanian case studies, with, of course, slight differences determined by the very perspective – home/host – from which these policies are represented. Therefore, seen from home as represented by the Romanian written press in general and by the two dailies Adevărul and Cotidianul in particular, the policies addressing Romanian migrants’ problems differ significantly according to the destination country, with Spain and Italy being most often in focus, since they host the largest Romanian diasporas in Europe. With regard to Spain, without ignoring migration-related criminal acts, Romanian newspaper articles comment, however, mostly on the good relations between the Spanish employers and the Romanian employees (with special reference to the strawberry pickers who first set a strong emigration trend to Spain and who are still highly regarded as “hard working employees, willing to work extra hours for modest salaries” - WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 37) and on the successful cooperation between the Spanish authorities and the Romanian migrant communities for the latter’s better social, economic and cultural integration (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 37 – see examples on pp. 37-38).   With regard to Italy, though, events reported about and journalists’ comments seem to point rather to a lack of consistent integration policies for Romanian migrants, at least before 2007. For a more thorough and better nuanced approach to Italian policies regarding Romanian/Roma migrants before and after the crisis-engendering Mailat case (November 2007), Romanian and Italian press articles were comparatively examined. One of the shared arguments is that it was only after the Mailat case that the lack of responsiveness of the Italian authorities responsible with solving the problems of the Romanian migrants, in general, and of the Roma Romanian migrants, in particular, was more vigorously brought to light. In some Italian newspapers (that Romanian journalists used occasionally as sources) like Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, this argument occurred in the larger context of the debate over the quick political solution (i.e., the Italian government ordinance for Romanian migrants’ expulsion) to the intercultural crisis triggered by the murder of Giovanna Reggiani, which included accusations to both the Romanian government for not having better controlled emigration to Italy and to the Italian government for not having taken the proper measures to ensure the host population’s safety and to properly implement projects and programmes regarding immigration to Italy. Both Romanian dailies, Adevărul and Cotidianul, closely followed the political crisis that the Italian ordinance triggered at a European level. Citing and commenting on Italian sources, Adevărul  drew attention upon the fact that “many Italian politicians were hardly willing to do anything to support the Romanian migrant community, or to take actions to constructively solve the various problems that Romanian migrants faced in their receiving country” (and examples of tension-creating ‘initiatives’ of certain Italian politicians were mentioned in the Italian press, next to violent police raids and xenophobic public reactions), and criticised the Italian administration for not participating in EU-funded programmes meant to facilitate Roma minority integration (unlike Bulgaria, Spain or Poland), thus echoing European reactions (José Manuel Barroso’s cited in La Repubblica) to the proposed Italian ordinance. As for Cotidianul, the critique of the Italian immigration policy proposals went hand in hand with that of the Romanian government and diplomatic circles’ mismanagement of the negotiations with their Italian counterparts, in full social and political crisis. The Romanian and Italian dailies alike reported on the outcome of the political and diplomatic crisis related to the Mailat case showing how the intervention of the EU institutions “contributed to effectively keeping the situation under control, preventing Italy from legally expelling Romanian migrants and encouraging joint – Italian-Romanian – involvement in programmes for Roma minority integration.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 41) In line with these politicians’ urges to tolerance and rejection of xenophobic feelings, certain Italian institutions (e.g. the Romanian Research Institute for Culture and Humanities in Venice and Villa Amoretti Library, the Town Hall of Rome, Italian libraries in Rome, the Italian Catholic Church, etc.) increased their efforts to promote policies of cultural integration of the Romanian migrants (e.g. literary meetings, book presentations, theatrical performances, the creation of the first Romanian diocese in Italy, etc.). (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 42-43)     Last but not least, the Italian judicial system was given an equally ambivalent image in Adevărul and Cotidianul. To be more specific, the Romanian journalists’ appreciative comments on the Italian Criminal Bar Association’s critical reaction with regard to the provisions of the controversial expulsion ordinance that taxed it as “abusively infringing upon human rights and European legislation” gave way, in time (2008-2009), to negative assessments of the criminal proceedings in the Mailat case, echoing, as a matter of fact, similar attitudes presented in the Italian press: “in certain articles, especially in those issued in 2008 and 2009, readers can grasp a general attitude of support towards Nicolae Mailat on the part of certain Italian citizens and of disagreement with the Italian judicial system, which is considered to have accused Mailat of rape and murder in the absence of relevant evidence.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 42) The same lack of a consistent immigration policy in the receiving society that the Italian and Romanian newspapers pointed at seems to loom largely in the journalistic discourse analysed within the framework of the Greek case. Examples of difficulties created by the increase in number of immigrant communities (e.g. in the islands of Mytilini, Samos, Agathonisi, Chios, Leros, etc.) in the absence of proper infrastructure (i.e., reception centres for immigrants and asylum seekers), legal and institutional frames are all aimed at exposing the authorities’ mismanagement of immigration issues in Greece; hence, as the Greek report puts it, “the urgency of an institutional frame and the relation between its lack and the racist danger transcends the newspapers’ point of view.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 15) Considering migration policies in a larger European context, the Greek newspapers raise “the issue of labour trafficking as a form of imprisoning migrants in a status of modern slavery” drawing attention upon “the benefits of the migration phenomenon to the economic development”. Moreover, they deplore the miserable conditions to which illegal migrants (e.g. from Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan) are condemned by the “fragile institutional infrastructure” (e.g. the Migration Department in Petrou Ralli Street, Athens) to “waiting in endless lines day in and day out in order to get a legal permit to stay in the country, unaware of their rights and not understanding the language”, easy prey to ruthless lawyers who take advantage of their situation. (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 15). That is why, the Greek journalists of Eleytherotypia and Kathimerini subscribe to the opinion of various associations dealing with immigration issues in Greece that “the complete reform of the migrant policy (…) [is] urgent and extremely important in order to deal with this reality, and in order to treat institutional, legal, social and psychological aspects of the migrants’ problematic situation.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 15-16)   But while the Greek authorities are shown to still have many ‘gaps’ to fill as far as immigration policies are concerned, Greek newspapers salute and support the civil society’s awareness of the need for vigorous action for the immigrants’ cultural integration. Therefore, “presentations of books, films, theatrical plays, music presenting a mixture of cultural elements or dealing with the theme of migration (migrants’ stories and heroes) are often found in the press.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 20) The Greek report cites in this respect interviews with film directors (e.g. Costas Gavras) and participants in famous film festivals (e.g. the Thessaloniki film festival), reports about (music or drama) festivals, public debates and colloquia on migration issues, all emphasising the idea that  culture can and must be used as “an element of communication and integration of the migrant population.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 20)       Having traced in the selected corpus connections between the extra-cinematic realities of migration (its causes and consequences in both the sending and the receiving societies) and certain peculiarities of the cinematic discourse, this third subsection of the synthesis report aims at examining, more extensively, particularly from an imagological perspective, “the dynamics of cross-cultural image-making unravelling at the intersection between linguistic (aesthetic/rhetorical) and historical (ideological/socio-cultural) aspects of discourse” with a view to highlighting “the conceptualisation of migration and the migrant’s experience [in] a significant imagined space that tries to figure or reconfigure an actual cultural terrain where the migrant transgresses embedded hierarchies established between self and other, native and foreign, home and deterritorialisation, centre and periphery, West and East.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 43) As the form and function of the auto- and hetero-images foregrounded by the features films in focus have turned to vary according to the specific case of the country in question and the filmic representations of the respective migrantscapes. The research of the Romanian team has focused on the insider’s and outsider’s views accordingly. Thus the analysis of the Romanian productions (WM, E, FL, IW, O) has revealed the interplay between notions of home – “emerg[ing] as an un-idealised landscape of contrasts between traditional certainties (community ties and the knowledge of place) and the unforeseeable pressures of modern-day existence”, and of a gradual, but painful passage from a collectivist to an individualist pattern of organisation – and the mirage of the West. Home is shown as ‘out of joint’, pervaded by desperation, a sense of displacement and frustration with increasing moral confusion that causes the balance between normality and deviance to be seriously disturbed. Hence, as relevant examples demonstrate, the recurrent metaphoric images of death used “to refer to the loss of traditional meanings of home.” (WP4 National Case Study –Romania, 2010: 44) In the foreign productions (RN and TB), on the other hand, home is only partly envisaged (in TB because RN focuses exclusively on the host society) and its representations seem to be generally fixed in Western stereotypes of Romania, whether materialised in a “sanitised view” fit for a tourist’s album or in unflattering images of poverty and moral compromise. The two ways of looking upon Romania as a source of migration combine in the only co-production, AT, in which “the scenery otherwise made up of disparate oppositional pairs (the picturesque versus the derelict, urban versus the suburban, the urban versus the rural, the new and the old) suggest[s] the social and economic cleavages in the local culture and invite[s] at the reconsideration of Romania’s margins and Romania as margin.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 44)   As for the representations of the host society, the Romanian report shows that all the feature films analysed start from the myth of the rich, almighty West, a land of all possibilities, only to gradually revisit it by means of either open endings (AT, O, E) that cast doubt on its truth value, tragic endings (IW, FL), or deconstruction and reconstruction of the myth from the point of view of the West itself (RN). (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 44)   Finally, the representations of Romanian migrants’ identity usually start from preconceived frames – “the adventurer vs. the exile – in the home culture; the adapter versus the alien – in the destination culture,” “the prodigal son/daughter (in the home culture); the illegal worker, the criminal and the woman trafficked for sexual exploitation (in the destination culture)” – but subtly play on them, abiding by them while, at the same time, dismantling them “by transgressing their typological and cultural borders.” (WP4 National Case Study –  Romania, 2010: 45)   Roughly similar representations of home, host and Romanian migrant seem to surface in some of the studied documentaries as well, with slight different nuances, of course, depending on the aspect of migration taken in focus by the foreign directors. Their often anthropological gaze on the host country still captures, though undeniably in stereotypical terms (the primitive East), the beauty of the idyllic natural landscape (J, T, GW, LT, BF), without failing, however, to observe the destructive forces at work within the national rural other. Hence, the same foregrounding of the metaphor of death of a culture in two sub-categories of documentaries, i.e. those dwelling on the effects of (illegal) labour migration on the rural communities (J, T, GW), and those focusing on the individual figures of the few Saxons left in Romania after the 1990s exodus of this ethnic group, whose choices are now limited to waiting for death (BF) or “returning home by leaving home” (LT). Otherwise, stress is laid on the same contrast and frustration-torn urban settings (S, IT). Dissolution of old identity patterns is revealed as either related to long-terms consequences of the communist regime and to a sense of identity rigidly defined causing entire ethnic communities to remain entangled in contradictory perceptions of self and other (BF, LT) or by the same myth of the Western mirage (J, T, GW, S, IT), which is systematically deconstructed. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 46-7)   In the FYROM productions the images of home often overlap with those of the imported host cultures through metonymical characters who both transgress inter- and intra-national borders and coalesce different cultural paradigms into their hybrid identities. Thus, the main characters in BR and CM “have managed to incorporate the influence of both of the cultures as the points of migration. Even better, their characters seem to be installed on a borderline, an in-between position which makes them foreigners in both cultures. They demonstrate a strong self-reflexive attitude which reevaluates the values and the system codes of each of the national communities they come from or emigrate in.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 12). Symptomatic is the case of Alexandar Kirkov (in BR) who “refuses the Western voyeuristic gaze and the hypocritical decency of the ‘Western’ liberal democracy”, only to end as a “victim of the paranoia ethnic and religious group fantasies and imagined communal identities”. Thus, home proves disruptive in itself, violently atomizing identities into ethnic, religious and political selves. Konstantin’s imagined “home” (in AL) crashes against the realities of group territorialities which label him as the “other”, “put in a permanent ‘state of exception’ with one’s own corporeal bare life”. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 9) Such cases “disclose the fragility and permeability of every attempt of de-contamination, self-containment, autarchic, monadic and enclosed identity and community”, with violence emphasized as “a matter of double bind … simultaneously exercised towards the [self and the] other” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 10). If violence and death loom large over the notion of “home”, the West, as its idealized counterpart, proves, nonetheless, contaminated with similar “identitarian conflicts which refuse any possibility for reasonable dialogue and communication” across cultures. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 12) In BR the West is represented by means of oppositional parallelism: “a family lunch in Macedonia and London, everyday life, gender-relations, people’s behaviour, urban and village’s landscapes, gender and sexual norms” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 19). Nevertheless, the Western assumed superiority towards the barbaric Balkans is undermined by the film’s montage with a vengeance, of: “traces, signs, elements, images, individuals, groups and gazes that are traditionally ascribed to the other.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 20) Images of “bloody tragedies taking place in Yugoslavia” are cunningly associated with the Ulster situation to finally erupt in the violent incident in the London pub, a metaphor for the heart of the civilized West. As such, “the representational strategy necessary for the construction of the ‘self’ in its difference from the ‘other’, and its naturalization as a strategy for fixing differences is permanently undermined by the intrusion of fleeting images in the ethnic and national landscapes of the ‘same’.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 20) It seems that accepting imposed geographical and mental frontiers presupposes giving in to pre-established identity patterns, which deny the dynamism of self-building. One recommended alternative is assuming the status of being constantly on the move, as suggested by the character of Marko (in CM), who “demonstrates the transnational workings on identity formation and exemplifies the diasporic existential aesthetics, as the working which opens identity to cultural influences and mobilizes it as an on-going process of (self)making instead of holding it as a thing or invariable essence.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 13). This identity-in-the-making is what CM advocates as desired migrant poetics, while, at the same time, “precipitating anxiety about the coherence of the nation and the stability of its imaginary ethnic or cultural core.” (Gilroy: 1997 in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 13)  Another available option is the one forwarded by CS, the documentary which de-centers canonical hierarchies by bringing to the fore the FYROM Roma fringe, problematizing “the political and power implications that are disguised in the genealogy of the current socio-political, cultural and economic status” of this community. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 22) While inviting to openness to the other through a recognition of the vitality of Roma culture – featuring characters “as shiny, happy and humoresque people who know how to celebrate life despite all of their existential problems” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 22) – it, nonetheless, remains tributary to discourses of power which forward stereotypes and further exclusion. In the mental geography of a migrant’s journey, Greece emerges as a destination culture, subsumed thus to the myth of the West. This is what the majority of the films researched by the Greek team foregrounds, though images of home cultures (Albania, Bangladesh and Kazakhstan in the main) are also present as stored memories of the migrant characters’ past and/or backgrounds justifying their rites of passage. Thus, in these films home and host countries, East and West meet to reveal themselves “as ‘inhospitable’ and depreciative for migrant young people in contrastive ways.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 16). The dominant representations of “home” play upon the contrast between “blazing landscape colours” and gloomy socialist aesthetics, patriarchal structures, precarious standards of living (in FS, M, K, TP), the only exception being that of H, which “presents Tirana in a fast ‘western like’ chaotic urbanization” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 16). Yet, though found wanting from the standpoint of material well-being, “home” is often envisaged as a pastoral idyll conjuring notions of lost innocence and traditions – as in EC, where home is synonymous with the innocence of childhood spent in rural Kazakhstan, brutally dispelled by the harsh realities and corruption of the (sub)urban Athenian migrant experience) – or as consonant with nature and centered around the family hearth – as in K, where the psychological conflict is triggered by the loss of these stable values, the very values that are restored in the film’s denouement to show “how nature manages to bridge people divided by ethnic origin, language and most importantly those divided by suspicion and xenophobia when it comes to the ‘other’”  (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 17). As host country, Greece deconstructs the myth of the “western liberal way of living” by contrasting “the destitution, the timidity, the embarrassment and the fear the immigrants live with” with “the nouveau riche ethos, the  xenophobia and racism of the majority of Greeks (FS, TP, H)” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 17). Playing on stereotypes, clichés and prejudices, C and H also posit that the relation immigrant-local may be decoded from different standpoints, depending on the many layers that build up the palimpsest of one’s identity, as revealed by the interplay of ethnic and national roles subsumed in the characters’ construction. Religion is added to the list in TP, only to suggest that such markers of identity as age, language, race, or class should efface the basic human structure that underlies our behavioural patterns. Metonymical for the West itself, Athens becomes the protagonist of the cinematic narrative of FS, M, S and C, only to reveal: the multi-racial and multi-cultural face of the city and at the same time a latent tension. From this point of view the end of C is significant : “an expressionist finale where the blue colour (of the Greek flag?) covers the city and the day’s first passers-by, among which is the main character who disappears into an unknown, crowded, xenophobic, religious, dirty, uninviting Athens” (Κatsounaki: 2008 in WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 18) As for the documentaries under survey (I, R, S, LEG, WE), all of them “allude to the pain of leaving the familiar surroundings and be separated from one’s own people; at the same time  the host country, Greece, is presented at best as paralysed by the huge number of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, and at worse as inhuman.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 18) The cold figures of the statistical data are processed for the benefit of the viewer via representative individual cases intended to stir compassion and to awake from complacency. Either through interviews or dramatizations, the migrant experience is captured as one of perpetual insecurity, hardship and exclusion (at home and in the host country, the difficult journey towards which most often turning out to be a futile attempt at attaining fulfillment.)   A comparative-contrastive approach to the way in which migration is presented from the cultural perspective in the Romanian, Greek and FYROM press brings to the fore the fact that this phenomenon involves, on the one hand, cultural adaptation on the part of the migrant population and the creation of specific cultural stereotypes, on the other. Referring to the cultural adaptation of migrants in various territories, the migrants’ transgression from their home country to host countries is a process most often involving a partial loss of identity, as well as problems of cultural adaptation and attitudinal change. As the selected corpus suggests, the success of the migrants’ cultural adaptation in new territories is mainly conditioned by the ways in which the host population supports the integration of migrants and of their culture in the receiving cultural space. The Romanian and FYROM press hint at the fact that the cultural adaptation of migrants is more problematic due to the frequent distinction between the “self” and the “other” made by the representatives of the host country, whereas the Greek press presents numerous instances in which the host population and authorities are actively involved in the integration of the migrant culture(s) in the host space, thus favouring the cultural adaptation of the migrant population to the new cultural realities. As pointed out in the WP4 National Case Study – Greece (2010: 20), “migration is presented as a strong inspiration element both in the European and in the Greek artistic and cultural scene. From the presentation of books (“acquaintance with the new Albanian poetry”, Kathimerini, May 27, 2008), through the use of women and also migrant women as models for every day fashion (Eleytherotypia, November 21, 2007) the migrants seem to become a reality we are dealing with, at least in the cultural domain”.  Hence the idea that “culture, art and cultural events are considered to be a powerful way of approaching the “other” living in the same space, in the perspective of an evolution of several stereotypes of the migrant population” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 21). Similar involvement in cultural activities are rather isolated in the Romanian press (see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 42) and the presentation of cultural events most often comes to balance the negative image created in the host countries in relation to the Romanian migrants. In cases in which the cultural integration and adaptation of migrants are not supported by the host population, migrants tend to create their own spaces where they can feel at home. As mentioned in the Romanian press, “TV programmes, online magazines and blogs (www. capsunar.ro, www.locknet.ro, www.adevarul.it, www.adevarul.es) that Romanian migrants have designed in order to express themselves openly, on the one hand, and the Romanian books donated by Romanians from home (“Pachet cu fotbal de acasă pentru ‘căpșunari’” – “ TV Programme Package with Football Matches from Home for Strawberry Pickers”, Cotidianul, 16 July 2007; “Spania: România văzută de pe blogurile conaționalilor” – “Spain: Romania as Seen on the Romanian Migrants’ Blogs”, Adevărul, 6 September 2009; “2.500 de cărți pentru imigranți” – “2,500 Books for Immigrants”, Adevărul, 23 September 2009; etc.) on the other, are just  some of the elements used to alleviate homesickness”.(WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 48) Regarding the cultural stereotypes created on the “invaded” territories, mention should be made that the press generally favours a negative representation of both the process of migration and of the migrant population. The more worrying aspect is that in certain situations the negative representations of migration and migrants in the press results in discriminating attitudes and actions on the part of the host population, which could be otherwise avoided by a more tolerant approach. A cultural stereotype created by the written press is “the ‘superiority’ of the host/receiving community as compared with the ‘inferiority’ of the home/ sending community” .(WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010:47 ) This opposition is visible especially in the approach to social and economic aspects of life in which the migrants’ representation as victims seems to originate.  Root causes of migration “[…] include transition, political instability, economic pressures and social and cultural factors. Such circumstances often intersect with other racial, ethnic, and class disparities […]. (Blanchfield, Margesson & Ribando Seelke: 2009 in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 23) Moreover, socio-economic aspects combine in numerous cases with national and ethnic issues, because as the Romanian and FYROM press suggest, only the representatives of certain ethnic groups (e.g. Roma people, Albanians) are more likely to become migrant, especially due to the socio-economic problems they have to cope with in their home countries. Victimization of migrant population is also more obvious in the Romanian and FYROM press, in which stress is directly or indirectly laid on the “self” and the “other”. Migrants are most often depicted in terms of “harmful” otherness which brings along with it an obvious invasion of vital space, criminality and violence. If reference is made to the Romanians migrating for labour in Italy their representation in the press is illustrative for the way in which migration can turn into a negative phenomenon which creates the host population the impression that migrants are invaders of their country (e.g. “Italia, cotropită de 105.000 de români și bulgari” – “105,000 Romanians and Bulgarians Invade Italy”, Adevărul, 4 January 2007). In fact, Romanian migration is looked upon as a phenomenon which deprives Italians of work opportunities, making them feel insecure in their own country. In addition, a discriminating tendency may be noted in certain articles (see the case of Nicolae Mailat) in which “the opposition between national identity and ethnic identity […] have been merged and there have been generalizations ranging from an individual case to a whole ethnic minority and from a group of migrants to a whole nation. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010:49). Such approaches to the issue of migration lead to confusion and to the wrong assumption nationality (for example Romanian) is assimilated by ethnicity (for example Roma) (see the case of Nicolae Mailat).   The situation is significantly different in Spain, where Romanian migrants, generically called   ‘strawberry pickers’, seem to enjoy more support on the part of both the authorities and host population, thus being better culturally-adapted (see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 38) and where national and ethnic groups are better delineated.     The examination of representations of Romanian women migrants in films starts in the Romanian report from the argument that, apart from the economic decline with disastrous social effects that followed the 1989 revolution, the increased feminisation of migration from Romania is also directly related to “the persistence of forms of patriarchy and a mentality that continues to limit women’s opportunities in the process of neo-accumulation and the public sphere.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 50) All the films analysed – feature and documentary, Romanian and foreign productions – “foreground the figure of the woman migrant as a product of the post-communist realities of Romania, insisting on her role as victim of a range of grave social, economic and cultural problems such as unemployment, poverty, limited child-care options and the continuing domination of male-centred values and hierarchies at both domestic and public levels.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 50) Therefore, representations of Romanian women migrants reveal them forced into either accepting mostly low-paid jobs in feminised sectors of the labour market (cleaning and caring, agriculture) or involved in ‘shameful’ activities like beggary and prostitution, altogether subject to multiple victimisation and marginalisation. It is only the strategies adopted by feature film and documentary directors in creating such representations that differ. Romanian feature films go either for obliquely decentring women’s “assumed hierarchical positioning by dispersing their representations in the stories within the stories that the films tell” (WM, FL, E) or for metonymical characters representing the host society and pointing to “composite hierarchies within Europe itself” (AT, O). Foreign productions, in their turn, subsume Romanian migrant women’s images to the already established West/East hierarchies of power adapting them in gender terms. In the documentaries, women’s representations are further nuanced by the basic social (and economic) dichotomies opposing the rural to the urban and the old to the young (J, T, GW), but end up returning to the same multiple (social, economic, cultural) victimisation in both the home and the host societies, which makes all attempts of young and middle-aged women (because the old ones have long interiorised the established patriarchal, large-power distance, collectivist patterns) to escape traditional roles (mothers and working wives), to succeed on their own and gain certain independence futile and ultimately severely punished, often by increased violence and exploitation (J, T, GW, S, IT). “Whether at home or abroad, women are crushed by the socially constructed myth of superwoman which, unlike that of superman, does not have positive connotations. Wives, mothers, lovers, cooks, working women, etc., they all do their best to fit prefabricated models, but fail and suffer in the process.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 52) With reference to the corpus of films researched into by the Greek team, the societal issues related to women refer mainly to the feminine migration from Eastern Europe and Albania which “came as a solution to the patriarchal structure of Greek society, charging with the ‘feminine duties’ [previously carried out by Greek women] immigrant women” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 22) employed with low wages to do domestic work. Another aspect emerging from the analysis is that of women being turned into objects of sexual exploitation, leading to the profitable “business” of human trafficking. Clear echoes may be found in L, P, FF and BSS, dealing with immigrant women engaged in domestic labour. They converge in what regards the economic causes of migration, as all of the characters are “victims of the poverty caused by the collapse of ‘socialism’ in the former Soviet Union and the war in Yugoslavia” (WP4 National Case Study –  Greece, 2010: 22), and they also try to cast a cold eye on their precarious condition and uncertain status in the new environment. The second aspect, related to the trafficking of women and that of prostitution, emerges in the same BSS, as well as in EC . While the  former places under the limelight the sexual exploitation of women as swamped under by financial difficulties, the latter discusses not only the differences between male and female prostitution – “since to a certain extent it remains a matter of choice for the male teenagers, whereas female prostitution in the film is always forced on them and the conditions that surround it are portrayed as worse than those inside the prison” (WP4 National Case Study –  Greece, 2010: 23) –  but trafficking also, presenting “the Greek reality of paid sex, drugs, racism and the commercialisation of women, that have as an objective their sexual exploitation […], a phenomenon which finds its way across the social spectrum of Greek society and is reproduced by its non-delinquent members, too.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 23) The same problematics is tackled by the documentaries which provide “a comprehensive account of the unfathomable horror of human trafficking” (WE), show “the different effects immigration experience has on one’s gender and profession” (LEG), or reverse the stereotype ‘Poor East versus Affluent West’ in presenting Eastern women turning down marriage offers from Western men, according to life principles other than material wealth. (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 23-24) As far as the FYROM corpus of films is concerned, women migration is underrepresented, for all the protagonists who trespass borders are male characters: “all of the selected films represent the migrant as male individual, thus subordinating the in-group migration experience to the experience of the migrating gendered male individual.” (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 13) Women remain trapped inside the strong patriarchal impositions governing the FYROM scene, paying the price for their intentions to escape the cultural gender norms of ethnic and religious traditions (Zamira in BR). The representation of gender in migration from the socio-economic perspective in the Romanian, Greek and FYROM press points to significant differences in the ways in which migrant men and women are regarded in these cultural spaces. However, the common elements linking migrants, irrespective of their gender, nationality or ethnic origins, seems to be the social and economic factors which often constrain them to explore new countries in search for better working and living conditions. Having little access to regular employment in the West and to training schemes adapted to the labour market demand, many migrant women are presented by the press as either turning to the informal sector (domestic helpers/ caretakers) or engaging in prostitution/ sex work. Such choices are most often criticized by the press (Romanian and FYROM press), but there are also instances when women migration for labour is appraised being presented as a positive factor for the host country. (see WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 24-25) As regards men, the press also presents them from a double perspective. Some of them are honest and hardworking people employed in different fields of activity- especially unqualified work- (e.g. constructions), whereas others are involved in acts of violence against either the host population (stealing, murder, rape) or their co-nationals (trafficking, rape) (see the cases in the Romanian and FYROM press). The nationalities most often referred to in relation to migration for work, whether men or women, are Romanian, Albanian, Moldavian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croat (see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 37, 49-59  and WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 28).     Irrespective of their nationality and of the labour sector migrant men and women are engaged in, their illegal status and social marginalization make them prone to becoming victims of different forms of violence, ranging from discrimination to rape and even murder. This aspect is traceable in the three press perspectives, i.e. Romanian, Greek and FYROM. The marginalization and discrimination of migrants is even more obvious when ethnic origins are brought to the fore. Roma people, for instance are regarded by the Italians as “naturally born killers” and since this ethnic group is frequently equaled to the Romanians, the conclusion may be drawn that discriminating attitudes may wrongly be directed towards a whole nation if generalizations are not well-founded: Can’t you see that Roma people are ‘naturally born’ criminals? The stereotype of this people of a threatening ‘nature’ favours a stream of underground violence which permeates our society. (“Il codice perduto della civilta” – “The Lost Code of Civilisation”, La Repubblica, 2 November 2007) (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 49-50) Similarly, ethnic origins represent a criterion of discrimination in Macedonia, where “poverty is associated with ethnic FYROM and Roma, and criminality to ethnic Albanians”. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 29)         Last, but not least, the fact may be noticed that in certain instances host societies are discriminating especially in terms of gender. Preference towards men or women seems to be conditioned by the interests of the host population and only seldom by the interests of the population in the sending country (see WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010:25). For example, Romanian/Roma men are explicitly rejected by the Italians, who openly declare their availability to host women and children (see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 65). One of the reasons might be the fact that migrant women and children are less violent, thus less dangerous, but the quality of the services provided by migrant women (house cleaning, baby sitting) and the fact that they are good wives for the men of the host population (see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 55), are reasons more likely to favour gender discrimination associated with the phenomenon of migration (see also WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 24).   The feature films surveyed by the Romanian team reveal that, whether employed in low-paid work sectors or reduced to begging or prostitution, Romanian migrant women are represented as completely deprived of any official support at home and abroad and, implicitly, because of the illegal status they have no other choice but to assume, deprived of any rights in the countries of destination. “Acceptance, recognition and citizenship are actually denied to the women except for those who marry or say they marry in the host country” (TB, WM, FL). (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 56) Most of the analysed documentaries (except for those tackling the Saxons’ migration – LT and BF – in which gender differences are regarded as secondary to ethnic ones) show interest in gender in migration issues and share the representation of Romanian migrant women as second rate citizens, living under the pressure of their awareness of being illegal and of the fear of deportation (J, GW, S) and, at the same time, trapped in the patriarchal system of gender norms (‘enslaved’ by their spouses or deceived and exploited by traffickers) (J, S, IT). Unlike the feature films, by their covering a wider range of aspects of women’s migration, the documentaries bring to the foreground, at least occasionally, institutional involvement, but even so, as the Romanian report remarks: “The very existence of associations, foundations, NGOs dedicated to the protection and instruction of women (especially mentioned in S – the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and the group of volunteers teaching Romanian migrants French – and in IT – a Romanian anti-trafficking NGO and the Moldovan branch of the La Strada NGO) tells the sad tale of their condition, inescapable as long as domination will stay focused on gender and cultural differences and as long as women migrants will accept the yoke.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 57) A similar situation regarding women’s status of illegal workers and second-rate citizens “without any kind of social security” (WP4 National Case Study –  Greece, 2010: 26) is signalled by the Greek researchers, who have identified it in L and P. As in the case of the representations of Romanian migrant women, marriage seems the only solution to escape this condition, but it too entails its risks: in L, “incapable of overcoming social racism and the exclusion that goes hand in hand with the life of an immigrant, [the Greek] Dimitri accepts an arranged marriage for his own good, instead of marrying his love [Liubi, the foreign maid he has left pregnant]”; in P, the Greek “Lianos, the employer of the immigrant Natasha, wants almost to ‘force’ her to marry him and live forever in Greece” (WP4 National Case Study –  Greece, 2010: 26). The documentaries also focus on the absence of institutions which might offer support for the victims of trafficking (WE), or give the institution of marriage as the easiest alternative for obtaining citizenship, only to show that it is not necessarily a viable option for all Eastern European women (ST). From the FYROM corpus of films, the one that arrests attention along these lines is CM, which de-mystifies “the politics of citizenship in the context of migration” through Atanas Georgiev who “de-naturalises the institution of marriage”, because: Marriage in this documentary is represented as one of the most frequent means for acquiring citizenship in a foreign country and, simultaneously, as the one of the essential cells of the state nationalism and the reproduction of the nation. (Yuval-Davis: 1997) Furthermore, it demystifies the nationalistic politics exercised through these institutions in order to conserve the ‘pure blood’ inheritance of the nation by the very insistence of same-nationality marriages and the extreme surveillance marriages with foreigners are put under (the interview Atanas and his future bride have with the lawyer who explicates the detailed legal framework and the nationalistic politics of the State in their treatment of foreigners). Provoking the information for the administrative procedures and the legal particulars a newly formed marriage with a foreigner incites, Georgiev manages to expose the absurdity and madness these procedures present. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM,  2010: 18). Marriage is also presented in connection with yet another institution, that of the church, whose historical impact on heterosexual marriage is forwarded through the semiotic content of the religious ceremony the film zooms in on. The gender-migration relation with the institutional and policy framework is not so well-nuanced in the written press. Moreover, the cases which may be discussed from this perspective are most often associated with trafficking of women for sex work or prostitution (see the Romanian and FYROM press) which requires collaboration on the part of institutions, both in the host and in the sending countries ( see section 4.3 in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 27-30). If reference is made to migrant men, their frequent association with violence and crime also favours institutional collaboration either for their capturing and punishment, or for their expatriation in the sending country. (see the case of Nicolae Mailat in WP4 National Case Study – Romania and section 4.3 in WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 27-30) The cases in which gender and migration are related to positive aspects are rather isolated. A good illustration in this respect might be the case mentioned by the Romanian press is that in which “Romanian migrant women can be initiators of political actions, and can even influence the actions of other people as some articles suggest when referring to migrant women involved in politics in the host country: “Româncă a fost aleasă pentru prima dată în Consiliul local din Padova” – “Padova: Romanian Woman, First Time Elected in Local Council”, Cotidianul, 25 June 2009; “Italia: O româncă, susţinută politic de partidul lui Veltroni, primarul Romei” – “Rome: Romanian Woman, supported by Mayor’s Political Party”, Adevarul, 5 March 2008) (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 58) The Romanian team’s comments on the representations of gender-defined identities in the feature films analysed are subsumed to the overarching observation that: “Though, to a greater or lesser extent, all of them focus on the differential experience of migrant women and men in the context of a gendered world, they still tend to comply with traditional encodings of masculinity and femininity which conform to societal expectations fostered by their respective cultural and historical location.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 58) Thus, the Romanian (co-)productions (WM, E, FL, IW, O, AT) generally display variations on traditional gender stereotypes according to which the feminine is equated with “the passive object, victimhood, sexuality, domesticity and motherhood”, “devoid of agency, because male figures invested with patriarchal authority either set in motion, deceive into or direct a woman migrant’s journey”. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 58) More nuanced and ambiguous seem to be the codifications of masculinity, as, in certain cases, its boundaries are transgressed by having male characters cast in the feminine role of victims of the communist regime, of deceitful ‘businessmen’ of the post-1989 Romania, or of the very West they migrate to (O, E, FL). As a matter of fact, some film narratives tend to associate, in the representation of Romanian male migrants, images of male victimhood with those of male aggression and criminality (E, FL), reinforcing thus Western stereotypes about the East European migrants. Foreign productions like RN take up such stereotypical representations of migrant-related violence and collapse images of Romanian migrant women’s victimisation, of ethnic and class distinctions among Romanian migrants, creating an amorphous picture of the criminal Romanian Other threatening a here conveniently feminine West (best epitomised in the different assaults on the body of the central character of the film, an Italian woman). Finally, the only woman-authored feature film analysed, another foreign production, TB, is only mildly subversive (by making the direction of the migrant’s displacement a rural, not a traditionally urban one) and does not generally escape “the traditional mapping of migration in the gendered dichotomy of the masculine West (…) and the feminine East.” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 59) The analysis in cultural terms of the documentaries selected by the Romanian team seems to converge towards the same idea that all women’s attempts at challenging patriarchal power and discourse patterns are doomed to fail, hence women migrants’/ potential migrants’ representations are systematically cast, as it was the case in the feature films as well, in terms of victimhood, sexuality, domesticity and motherhood (even in documentaries directed by women like S). The exemplifications from all seven documentaries (J, T, GW, S, IT, LT, BF) dwell thus on representations of: marital relationships in which women must tend to all their husbands’ needs (J, T, GW, LT, S); mothers, with an aim at bringing to the foreground the debate over the “good mother provider” and the “bad absent mother” to which Romanian women migrants’ identity is inextricably connected (J, S). women as sex objects traded and abused by deceitful, domineering male figures as part of the human trafficking chain (IT). The particular situation signalled by the Greek researchers with respect to culture and gender is summarized as follows: From the five films which constitute this category (EC, BSS, L, FF, P) the last three are made by women directors (and also writers and producers), an interesting fact considering that women as directors are minority in the Greek (as in the international) cinema. This explains to a certain degree the fact that in their films, although the main feminine characters are discriminated to do the cheap, underestimated, ‘feminine’ labour, they are not passive objects devoid of agency and they do not accept the role of ‘victims’ as natural and unavoidable. (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 30) Always marred by their “otherness”, the female migrant characters in the above-mentioned films are subjected to demeaning experiences rooted in prejudice and inertia towards inter-cultural exchange which, strangely enough, also bring about difficulties in establishing intra- and inter-gender relationships. Liubi in L, always the ‘foreigner’, “becomes an easy target for the dysfunctional family [she works for] to vent their frustrations” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 30). Anya in FF, despite the fact that her “Greek” employer is herself a former immigrant from Istanbul, is initially treated as the inferior other by the old Mrs. Fotini. Natasha in BSS, though eager to endure hardships in order to integrate herself in the Greek society, is eventually forced to become yet another commodity, as she has to “pass involuntarily (because of financial problems) from illegal and cheap labour to prostitution” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 31). The other Natasha in EC pushes this experience to the extreme, becoming a mere object of a general male-dominated sexual trade where buyers and sellers efface the distinction between native and foreign. Nevertheless, there are instances which might suggest the possibility for migrant women to be empowered in adopting active roles in the host society.  Liubi in FF turns her back on her past as a victim and, “determined to raise her child alone, leaves behind the corruption of the family with which she lived temporarily”, the film thus showing that what had seemed to be “the ‘weakest link’ is in fact the strongest one” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 30). Anya in FF “moves on and starts afresh” after “a human relationship which is created in unfavourable circumstances” helps both herself and her employer discover who they are. “In this manner, despite the differences in ethnic origin, class, age and language, what will surface is what these two women share in common: a common fate as it is encapsulated by the loss of their home country, their family, and, ultimately, their identity.” (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 31) The documentaries reinforce the above-mentioned in two divergent but significantly similar ways. Irina in WE chooses to commit suicide so as to put an end to “the violent annihilation of human dignity that sexual exploitation brings about”, while the “brides” in ST refuse to be “sold” into marriage abroad, thus subverting stereotypical views on Eastern European womanhood. (WP4 National Case Study – Greece, 2010: 32) In the case of the FYROM corpus what needs to be reiterated is the fact that the image of the migrant is constructed along male lines, having masculine characters as protagonist, which entails, nonetheless, a reversal of the traditional mapping of migration in the gendered dichotomy of the feminine East and masculine West. Anne Clinton in BR and the prospective Austrian brides in CM are tangible embodiments of Western territories to be conquered ad possessed by Eastern men like Aleksandar, Atanas or Marko. But a more subtle though oblique representation of border-crossings was identified in the filmic architectural scaffolding with intra-national, inter-group, cross-gender transgressors like Zamira and Kiril, whose attempts at marrying outside the “tribe” in BR bring about their tragic end. Zamira’s emasculation as a form of rebellion and Kiril’s hermaphrodite figure as an expression of conformity mark them as others to traditional gender norms  and, consequently, account for them becoming transgressors of the broader religious and cultural impositions governing their respective communities (the Muslim Albanian patriarchy vs. the Orthodox FYROM monasticism): The detailed semiotics of the gender norms’ transgression of Zamira is perfectly weaved in the signifying chain comprising signs of her clothes and her hairstyle, the structure of her relations to her grandparent and her brothers and her connections with elements from the other system of signs as ethnic markers, that is the FYROM ethnic community and males in particular. She refuses to wear the veil as a religious gender code and wears sport t-shirt. […] In the narrative structure of the film her hair has been cut as a punishment from her grandparent for her disobedience, but on a connotative level, considering the culturally impregnated context, it is also a sign for ‘masculinity’. […] And finally, her decision to break the code of “pure blood” and leave with the young monk Kiril, FYROM Orthodox Christian, is severely punished with the most extreme form of exercising the ethicist biopolitical mechanism of power which is murder. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 16-17) His [Kiril’s] gentle, baby face, evoking images of mythic hermaphrodite figure, lapse the bodily ‘masculinity’ not only of his fellow monks, but of the other men in the FYROM village. The beard, robust and sharp countenance and the vulgar humor as signifiers written on the bodies and in the behavior of men of his ethnos are counter posed by his appearance and his behavior.[…] Firstly, breaking the rules and the order of the monastic community (by keeping and hiding the Albanian girl) will cost him with being expelled from the order, and further on, his forbidden desire and unavowed love with Zamira will incite her murder. (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 17)   In CS, gender-transgression builds a more complex image of ethnic border-crossings, operating not only horizontally along the East-West coordinates but, more poignantly, along vertical divisions between the East and its Roma Other. The documentary invites at a movement inwards into this otherness as represented by Shutka, a northern suburb of Skopje, allowing a voice to the previously silenced and broadening the scope of the investigation by introducing two transgender persons intended to challenge the common prejudice towards this subculture, as “reflected in the bloggers and common people’s comments and mockeries which express simultaneously an relation of disgust and fascination and attraction.”  (WP4 National Case Study – FYROM, 2010: 23)   Culture–related issues on gender and migration in the written press “cover particularly the specific stereotypes associated with migrant men and women as seen in the sending and the receiving countries”. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 63) If reference is made to migrant men, the stereotypes most often mentioned or hinted at by the press are those of criminals, murderers, rapists or traffickers (see the Romanian and FYROM press). As regards migrant women, caretakers, domestic workers, good/bad mothers (see the Romanian press) and prostitute (see the Romanian and FYROM press in particular) are among the most common stereotypes found in the written corpus. Out of these stereotypes, the migrant prostitute is the one which seems to be “used and abused by the written press” (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 63-64) as the analysis of the written press corpus shows. This situation is hardly appraisable because emphasis on migrant prostitution and prostitutes is likely to “generate sexist opinions and attitudes, reinforcing the image of a patriarchal society which confines women to either the domestic or the sexual sphere”. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 63-64) In their position of prostitutes, migrant women often become victims of violence, and this is a risk they sometimes (un)willingly take (see, for example, cases of trafficking in the FYROM and Romanian press). Nevertheless, women in the host countries are also often victims of violence, especially on the part of the migrant men, their cases never being related to human trafficking or prostitution. When presenting such cases the approach in the written press of the host country is significantly different. This is due to the fact that the press (see the Italian newspapers) tends to discriminatingly insists on the cases of migrant men violence against women of the host population, as compared to those of domestic violence involving men and women of the host population. Moreover, mention should be made that the approach to violence against migrant women is more balanced in the press of the sending countries. The Romanian and FYROM press, for example, present cases in which Romanian and FYROM women/ girls are victims of physical violence on the part of the host population and human trafficking on the part of their co-nationals. Newspapers in the sending country also make reference to the cases of migrant men’s violence against women in the host countries (see the case of Nicolae Mailat in the Romanian press). In addition to this, it is interesting to notice that sometimes the press in the host country proves supportive and non-discriminating to migrants. This is the case of the Greek press which focuses on the case of a migrant woman who became a victim of violence on the part of the host population. Such an admirable perspective is in opposition with the tendency of certain host country press (see the Italian press) to seemingly ignore cases of violence against migrant women, either by the host population or by migrant co-nationals, and to intentionally insist on the cases of migrant violence against the host country- women. An interesting aspect to be pointed out is that “when the victims are women or girls from the destination country, for example Italy, the nationality or ethnic origins of the aggressor(s) is explicitly mentioned as in the examples below: “O bandă de hoți care vorbeau românește au luat ostatică fata unui om de afaceri italian” – “Gang of Thieves Speaking Romanian Take Hostage Italian Businessman’s Daughter”, Adevărul, 8 January 2008; “Doi români suspectați de violarea unei italience” – “Two Romanians Suspected of Italian Woman’s Rape”, Cotidianul, 15 January 2009; “Bărbații care au violat o fată de 14 ani la Roma sunt români” – “Rome: Men Raping Girl, 14, are Romanians”, Cotidianul, 16 February 2009; “Un român a violat o bătrână oarbă de 83 de ani din Italia” – “Italy: Romanian Rapes Blind Old Woman, 83”, Cotidianul, 17 February 2009; “Bătrâna violată de un român în Italia a decedat în spital” – “Old Woman Raped by Romanian in Italy Dies in Hospital”, Cotidianul, 23 February 2009; “Doi români sunt suspectați că au violat o italiancă în virstă de 12 ani” – “Two Romanians Suspected of Raping Italian, 12”, Cotidianul, 2 March 2009. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 64-65) In discussing the bad mother stereotype, mention should be made that the press attaches this label to migrant women (see the Romanian press), because in spite of their efforts to provide for their families, the fact cannot be ignored that the children and sometimes their husbands left back are affected by the absence of women, traditionally seen as mothers and wives, and not as independent beings and providers for their families. Migrant women are not presented as good mothers in the written press, but this stereotype used in relation to victimized women from the host countries as a resource of further discriminating attitudes against violent migrant men. For example, when “reference is made to the Italian woman as a victim of migrants’ violent acts, she is referred to as a “good wife and mother”, “decent person” different from the Romanian migrant woman who is a “bad mother” and/or “prostitute””. (WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 65) Instead of a conclusion, mention should be made that the cases when migrant women are presented aggressors are not so numerous, but they seem to be insisted on by the press in the host country (see the Italian newspapers) as a means of supporting discriminating and xenophobic attitudes on the part of the host population (see WP4 National Case Study – Romania, 2010: 65). The focus of the three national cases surveyed has been on: Romania as a predominantly migrant-sending society; Greece as a predominantly migrant-receiving society, and FYROM as in between a migrant-sending and a migrant-receiving society, most often represented as a transit space. The analysed texts have foregrounded topical issues in the wider context of communicated concepts and interpretations on migration, such as: the risks and costs of (il)legal migration (Romanian film and press, Greek film and press, FYROM film and press); labour migration (Romanian film and press; Greek film and press); obtaining citizenship through marriage (Romanian film, Greek film and press, FYROM film); sex work/trafficking for sexual exploitation (Romanian film and press, Greek film, FYROM press); child-abandonment (Romanian film and press, Greek film); criminality (Romanian film and press, Greek film and press, FYROM press); inter-/intra-ethnic conflict/divergence (Romanian press, Greek film and press, FYROM film and press); the gradual extinction of local cultures through emigration (Romanian film, Greek film). What may be inferred from the above is the fact that migration is most often represented as a disquieting experience, with the very few success stories presented incapable of opposing the dominant idea advertised, that of preserving imaginary borders and geographical spaces. Considering the texts’ politics of gender representation, the experiences of migrant women and men are differently recorded by the two media in the three national cases. Thus, in the Romanian feature films and the FYROM written press stress is laid upon a predominantly feminine cast of migrant characters, proof of the increased feminization of migration. In Greek feature films, documentaries and written press, as well as in the Romanian documentaries, equal attention is devoted to men and women migrants, which offers a gender-balanced view of migration. In the Romanian written press the tendency is to provide a gender-neutral profile of the migrant, whereas the FYROM feature films and documentaries foreground male migrant figures only. This might be indicative of the societal changes, the institutional realities and the cultural frames that define the three spaces in which the phenomenon has been analysed, but are operative not only locally but also at a global level.   What the investigation has brought to the fore is that the media translates migration as being triggered by and bringing about deep fractures and constant transformations in both home and host societies. Home societies are portrayed either as in transition or inertly traditional, but always as conflict ridden, leaving traces in the way in which the migrant is textualised as victim or misfit. The Romanian film features the country as in between communism and capitalism, collectivism and individualism, localism and globalization, rural and urban and as exhibiting violent contrast along economic, social and spatial lines. The Romanian newspapers predominantly characterize it in economic terms as an unattractive labour market with severe consequences at the social level through unemployment, marginalization and impoverishment. Seen in the reverse mirror of the Greek film or the FYROM written press, the same unfavourable economic context defines it. In FYROM’s case, the film most poignantly witnesses the abrupt transition of this country from past to present circumstances, insisting on the persistence of inter- and intra-national borders along ethnic and religious lines. On the other hand, the written press in FYROM mentions that the economic aspects are not conducive of migration. From the standpoint of a migrant’s home, host societies are imagined as superior in all respects, but most of the Romanian and FYROM texts looked into tend to disclose the mismatch between expectation and reality. Greece, as host, represents itself as in transition between outmoded nationalist attitudes and the current tolerance towards and acceptance of its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural mix in film and written press. As regards the institutional frame, all three partners seem to point to a certain under-representation in both film and written press.  Recurrent, however, are images of matrimonial agencies, private employment companies, GOs and NGOs, judicial, administrative and political structures that attempt to regulate migration, or other institutions which support the migrants’ integration. These resume an effort in the making in the direction of creating the appropriate infra-structure for the reception and naturalization of the migrant population with policies, programmes thought out to improve the present-day migrant experience.   As cultural texts, films as well as newspaper articles remain embedded in a recognizable social matrix, in keeping with the inner dynamics and outspoken ideals of the given communities. When mediated, images of individual migrants, due to the marketing strategies of their dissemination across cultures, become metonymic for representations of national identity, thus exported or imported. The form and function of the auto- and hetero-images foregrounded by the films in focus vary in keeping with the specific cases of the respective countries and filmic representations of their migrantscapes. Thus, the Romanian surveyed filmic texts show a pervading sense of desperation, displacement, moral confusion and loss of tradition (as the recurring metaphor of death suggests) looming large over the meanings of home.  Otherwise, ‘home’ vacillates between Western stereotypes of The East as exotic tourist attraction, idyllic, but primitive Eden, or land of poverty and moral compromise. At the opposite end, the imagined cartography of the films situates the myth of the rich and mighty West. Ironically, most films cast it into doubt or bluntly deny it. Placed in-between, the migrant’s construction  largely abides by the traditional stereotypes of “adventurer”, “exile”, “prodigal son/daughter” (in the home culture),  “adapter”/”alien” or the more recent “illegal worker”, “criminal” and “prostitute” (in the destination culture), but also slightly destabilises them by trespassing or conjoining their typological and cultural borders. In the Greek case, the myth of the West is resumed by the representations of Greece itself, justifying the rites of passage undertaken by the migrant characters. Nonetheless, the same as in the Romanian corpus, this myth is deconstructed and stereotypes, clichés and prejudices are played on allowing for the relation immigrant-local to be decoded from different standpoints, subsumed in the characters’ construction being the interplay of ethnic, national and religious roles. Markers of identity like age, language, race or class are suggested as effacing communication at a basic human level. The FYROM productions overlap the images of home with those of imported hosts, which, nevertheless are atomized along ethnic, religious and political lines. The same as with the Romanian and Greek cases, the West fails to sustain its myth as an idealized counterpart of home, and the migrant similarly assumes the mask of “adventurer”, “exile” and “prodigal son”. One exception is that of the “migrant in-between cultures”, functioning as integration facilitator. Another is that of the “intra-cultural migrant”, who turns the fringes into a gravitating centre. Though, to a greater or lesser extent, all texts focus on the differential experience of migrant women and men in the context of a gendered world, most of them comply with traditional encodings of masculinity and femininity, in accordance to the societal expectations fostered by their respective cultural and historical location. Thus all three sampled sets tend to represent womanhood in terms of sexuality, domesticity, motherhood and victimhood. With a few exceptions signaled by the Greek team, woman is constructed as a passive object devoid of agency, while the male figures are invested with patriarchal authority and either set in motion, deceive into, direct or bring to an end women migrant’s journeys. This situation is amplified to the extreme in the FYROM selection, where the migrant’s identity is built exclusively as male, while women attempting to escape cultural bounds through symbolic migration are literally and metaphorically erased. The codification of masculinity is more ambiguous. In the Romanian case, the roles of victimiser and victim are often conflated, the latter dominating men migrants’ narratives. Although not so much emphasized, the same stands true for the Greek corpus. With FYROM, the masculine characters largely conform to the same pattern, to which is added the gender transgressor, whose deliberate choice challenges preconceived labels. The traditional mapping of migration in the gendered dichotomy of the masculine West and the feminine East, sustained by most of the films, is reversed in the FYROM texts, as well as in one Romanian exception, thus reinforcing the stereotype of the masculine “Other” that attempts to conquer and possess a feminine West. In the more factual journalistic discourse, the emphasis is laid upon more recent cultural stereotypes related to (il)legal labour migration, criminality and human-trafficking.  Thus, the Romanian samples bring to the fore stereotypes like: the “strawberry picker” and the “criminal Roma”. As the analysis of Romanian newspaper articles reveals, in the destination cultures the former is only circulated among members of the Romanian Diaspora and is rejected on its assumed pejorative connotations, while the latter is generalised so as to erase ethnic differences in the stereotype of the Romanian criminal Other. Complying with the traditional encodings of femininity and focusing on women migrant’s transgression of traditional roles as wives and mothers (e.g. the ‘home alone’ children campaign), Romanian articles foster the stereotypes of “bad mother” and “easy woman”. Otherwise, many focus on sensationalist news in which “victimhood” is equated with the image of the Romanian woman migrant. The FYROM articles, focusing solely on the trafficking of women, makes frequent recourse to the stereotype of the “Eastern European migrant-prostitute”, victim of patriarchy and confined to being mere object of trade and inflicted violence.  One note is that gender identity is overemphasized in comparison with national or ethnic identity. When images of intra-national minority are at stake, as it happens with the Roma community, they are governed by nature rather than civilization, and are therefore doubly discriminated on. The Greek press analysis signals a general positive attitude towards the migrant population, which is found to run counter to the general public aversion towards the latter. Focusing in the main on labour migration, and attempting to instruct rather than inform on the topic, the articles envisage to expose the shallow nature of stereotyping practices by offering in-depth perspectives of memorable individual cases of migrants with personal histories and commonly shared values and aspirations, thus erasing difference in favour of sameness. One particular set of articles that stands out from the rest in the Greek case is that of Konstantina Kouneva, whose approach offers a gendered perception of the migration phenomenon, and challenges pre-conceived notions of gender-roles, as well as the stereotype of the female migrant domestic worker, by her active stance and political involvement in the trade union movement As emerging from the above, images and stereotypes of different others are indicative of vernacular attitudes that permeate the multiple levels of a given society. But due to the fact that the media makes them circulate globally, they come to reach other, more or less distant communities, where their representations can be examined, evaluated, or contested against opposing representations. As such, the media can facilitate the dialogue between and across cultures, a dialogue that hopefully will lead to an acknowledgement of the shifting and expanding nature of a European space where multiculturalism and migration restructure intercommunal relations within and beyond the nation-state, transgressing thus embedded hierarchies established between self and other, native and foreign, home and deterritorialisation, centre and periphery, West and East. Although migration inevitably brings about unsettling experiences, it is a fact that it has become, for many today, a way of life. Therefore the media, by underwriting their trajectories to other cultures and societies, should empower the migrants to integrate and overcome marginalisation by highlighting their potential contribution to the wholesomeness of the European heritage. Since in today’s world, images tend to carry more persuasive weight than writings, filmic texts registering the dynamic interplay of cross-cultural perceptions which migration entails should reach out to a wider public through: financing the organisation of thematic festivals (or sections within festivals) in all European countries, followed by workshops, roundtables, etc on the issue of migration; broader national television broadcasting of films dealing with the phenomenon of migration; issuing good quality multi-language subtitled copies of the most representative productions to be disseminated locally and globally; encouraging the creation of national and international libraries or archives of films on migration to support research into the field; establishing European electronic data bases with an informative role on filmic texts about migration; stimulating the funding of cinematic endeavours in the field; developing research programmes, collaborative projects, exchange schemes, international partnerships aimed at raising awareness as regards the role of the cinema in informing on and promoting tolerance towards a multicultural Europe; ensuring the necessary equipment for using film to support the accessing of other cultures in the educational milieu. Because the press has a crucial role in mentality formation and manipulation, its representational power should be used to encourage positive cross-cultural dialogue by: improving journalistic professional training in view of: promoting high-quality journalism in editorial offices and media companies; raising public awareness on: 7.   References Agustín, Laura (2005) “Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate”, in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 96-117. Blanchfield, Luisa, Rhoda Margesson, Clare Ribando Seelke (2009), International Violence towards Women, U.S.: Nova Science Publishers. 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