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# The Quest for Representation +++
title = "The Quest for Representation"
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# The Quest for Representation
Jafari’s film begins on the shores of the Greek island of Lesvos, with images that have become iconic for Europe’s borders today. At Greece’s closest point to Turkey across the Mediterranean, volunteers on the shoreline and local fishermen in their boats welcome and help the passengers of a black rubber dinghy, filled to capacity, as they disembark. As quietly compelling as they start out, these scenes of first encounter soon become dramatic as a thrilling soundtrack accompanies a fisherman’s pursuit of a trafficker in coastal waters. I was immediately gripped by these events, and while the film introduced me to these scenes for the first time, the images also seemed strangely familiar. The way we know that since 2015, similar boats have been inundating these very shores is a result of European audiences having been flooded with similar news media images. But even before that, the internationally-used term, “boat people”, had become a way to refer to a group of migrants who are the most vulnerable to becoming the object of visual media sensationalism. Given this opening, I immediately wondered whether the film would manage to move beyond the usual representations that saturate the discussion, framing refugees as symbols of either extreme suffering or threat. Jafari’s film begins on the shores of the Greek island of Lesvos, with images that have become iconic for Europe’s borders today. At Greece’s closest point to Turkey across the Mediterranean, volunteers on the shoreline and local fishermen in their boats welcome and help the passengers of a black rubber dinghy, filled to capacity, as they disembark. As quietly compelling as they start out, these scenes of first encounter soon become dramatic as a thrilling soundtrack accompanies a fisherman’s pursuit of a trafficker in coastal waters. I was immediately gripped by these events, and while the film introduced me to these scenes for the first time, the images also seemed strangely familiar. The way we know that since 2015, similar boats have been inundating these very shores is a result of European audiences having been flooded with similar news media images. But even before that, the internationally-used term, “boat people”, had become a way to refer to a group of migrants who are the most vulnerable to becoming the object of visual media sensationalism. Given this opening, I immediately wondered whether the film would manage to move beyond the usual representations that saturate the discussion, framing refugees as symbols of either extreme suffering or threat.