Towards a Fifth Cinema

Following other advances in international film movements, namely Third and Fourth Cinema, we propose the concept of Fifth Cinema to refer to a composite of audio-visual production developed primarily by refugees and/or enabled with their interests and stories at the centre. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, Fifth Cinema exhibits certain stylistic similarities, from the films’ open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and its transgression. Characteristically, it is a cinema that is nomadic, insecure, fragmented, displaced, bricoleur, accented, hybrid. Emotionally and politically fraught, it is emergency cinema, getting unheard voices heard. It is a smart cinema enabled by the spread of digital technologies making it instantaneous, dispensable yet indispensable as a record of a millennial phenomenon. By no means a concerted social movement, it is certainly about reflecting on the surge of individual movements and their filmic outputs, occasionally collective as the result of shared endeavours and co-productions. In this article, we chart some key features and proponents of Fifth Cinema as an ‘open corpus’ and as part of making a political statement: that refugee conditions and contributions are appreciated, valorised and supported with the means to represent themselves, creatively, interculturally and politically through the (co-)production of their own stories with what we propose as an ‘open poethic’ approach.