This chapter provides a historical overview of the representation of migrant experiences in European cinema from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century. It begins with post-war depictions shaped by social realism and the ‘cinema of duty,’ in which migrants were often shown as marginalised outsiders defined by alienation and hardship. It then traces the emergence of second-generation and diasporic filmmakers during the 1980s and 1990s, whose works introduced more diverse, hybrid, and genre-inflected narratives that expanded beyond earlier frameworks. The discussion highlights how, by the turn of the millennium, transnational aesthetics came to the fore, reflecting the plural and interconnected realities of migration in an increasingly globalised Europe. Across these shifts, the chapter argues, European cinema’s migrant narratives have moved from the periphery to the centre, with nostalgia emerging as a recurring affective thread that links stories of displacement, memory, and belonging. This emphasis on nostalgia provides a thematic bridge to the following chapter, which focuses on Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven.