“A strangely familiar place”: Cinematic (Re)framings of the EU’s Easternmost Border

Abstract

In the 2014 nonfiction film Evaporating Borders: A Story in Five Parts, filmmaker Iva Radivojević returns to the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where she grew up as a migrant following the breakup of Yugoslavia, to document the influx of asylum seekers arriving there at the outset of the Syrian civil war. For close to 50 years, Cyprus has been geographically and politically divided into a Turkish-Cypriot-controlled north (occupied by the Turkish military since 1974 and unrecognized by the international community) and a Greek-Cypriot-controlled south (the seat of the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus). The island’s accession to the European Union in 2004 has meant that the EU’s easternmost border now lies on the unstable and contested fault line of the Cyprus divide.

This chapter argues that displacement is not just the subject of Evaporating Borders, but its formal and narrative principle, an interpretive and epistemological framework used to subvert fixed, hegemonic narratives of place and identity. Displacement’s potency as an artistic and analytical lens is evident in Radivojević’s distinct vision of Cyprus as a fundamentally multicultural space rife with contradiction and paradox, an approach that differs greatly from dominant representations of the island as a divided, bicommunal, bicultural space paradigmatic of the so-called clash of civilizations between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks’, and Christians and Muslims. Refracted through the lens of the island’s refugee and migrant populations, Cyprus’ highly specific geopolitical context is shown to be a microcosm of the European Union as a whole.

One day, in early July, sixty-five migrants were caught floating in the Adriatic Sea, off the coast of Croatia. Cramped on a boat without gas, they wanted to find themselves in a country of the European Union. Soon, they found themselves in Dubrovnik, the most touristic place in Croatia. A few days later, nearby, on the Mediterranean’s waters, about fifty people die, trying to do something similar: reach Italy. Twenty-five-year-old Abbas, the only survivor, gives different stories about their trip from Tunisia. A bit further to the south, at the end of August, a boat carries four men, a woman, and two children, from Syria to the northern coast of Cyprus. No one survived, besides the smugglers who were arrested as soon as they landed safely on shore. Such incidents become known only if a fisherman finds a body floating off the coast.

—Opening voice-over text (Evaporating Borders 2014)