Against and Beyond Mimeticism A Cinematic Ethics of Migration Journeys in Documentary Auto-Ethnography

This chapter traces a cinematic ethics of migration expressed in two digital auto-ethnographies of migration journeys, Midnight Traveler (Hassan Fazili, 2019) and Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020). The two documentaries utilize digital filmmaking tools to create cinematic aesthetic spaces in which the practice of mediating migration is critically interrogated, including the experience of coercive mimeticism as a process of self-objectification and compliance with the European imaginary of the migrant subject. By providing an analysis of the relation between aesthetics, affect and ethics in Midnight Traveler and Purple Sea, this chapter proposes an understanding of the two documentaries as affording engagement with autonomy of migration and the process of queering “Europeanness.”