Ways of Seeing: Ethics of Looking in European Refugee Films

Taking stock of a new cycle of refugee films since 2015, this chapter inquires into the ethical trade-offs involved in the various aesthetic strategies filmmakers have adopted as they engage themes of migration, displacement, asylum, home(lessness), and hospitality. I draw on work by John Berger, Bill Nichols, and Susan Sontag to distinguish between four different looks, or gazes, that become encoded in formal choices ranging from camera mounts and angles to different narrative perspectives and documentary strategies. Using four films to exemplify these different approaches, I outline a view from above in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017); a view at eye level in Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler (2019); an experimental gaze in Philip Scheffner’s Havarie (2017); and a reciprocal gaze in Jakob Preuss’s When Paul Came Over the Sea (2017).