Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.For all its escapist tendencies, cinema has often served as a mirror to real life — and so it does today. As incendiary rhetoric around migration drives far-right political campaigns across Europe and America, the past year has brought a flurry of films examining the hardships of exile and displacement. Many seek to make visible the migrant labour that keeps our cities running: the bike courier in L’Histoire de Souleymane (2024), the warehouse “picker” in On Falling (2024), the New York kitchen staff in La Cocina (2024). All of these films put the spotlight on an immigrant underclass and openly critique political systems that foster a collective indifference to its struggles.They also implement a strikingly similar structure, unfurling in a short burst of consecutive days, following a single protagonist. We are presented with a cumulative day-in-the-life portrait: they go to work; return to an isolating or hostile living space; go back to work. Pressure builds and alienation pervades. And in each case the story culminates with the protagonist being put on trial by a more privileged class or system — an asylum interview in L’Histoire de Souleymane, a job interview in On Falling, a threatened redundancy in La Cocina. Such moments exemplify the precariousness of the “defendant” — their future placed in other people’s hands, dependent on cruel systems that are skewed against them. In L’Histoire, we meet a refugee from Guinea who struggles to make a living in Paris working illegally as a food-delivery cyclist. Boris Lojkine’s film is paced almost like an action film, with dizzying tracking shots chasing Souleymane down narrow Paris streets as he pedals furiously, experiencing various mishaps along the way. As he cycles, he attempts to memorise the narrative he has concocted about being a political refugee in order to seem more “legitimate” in his upcoming asylum interview. When that moment arrives, it becomes a traumatic experience for Souleymane.At the centre of On Falling is Aurora, a Portuguese woman working in an Amazon-like warehouse in Edinburgh. She dashes through lanes of haphazardly filled floor-to-ceiling shelves where ropes, dildos and books all cohabitate. If she is too slow, a warning alarm on her scanning device beeps incessantly — a reminder that her job is constantly at stake. Her routine is repetitive and mind-numbing: picking, cafeteria lunch, eating alone, checking her phone. Finally, Aurora breaks down when asked a question about her “free time” as she realises she has nothing in life beyond her work. Neither Souleymane nor Aurora can afford the luxury of hobbies. Both are constantly surveilled by a tracking camera — often handheld — that pursues them through their claustrophobic worlds, starkly emphasising their isolation, even in public spaces. Such an exposing gaze asks us not to turn away, yet it is also harsh and often without affection. Meanwhile, the cathartic finales, in which both protagonists lay bare their “real” stories, leave a bittersweet aftertaste, implying that their struggles can only be understood through such acts of painful self-exposure. Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina opts for a more melodramatic approach, often boiling over as chefs and waiting staff rush around in a fashion similar to hit streaming series The Bear. Against the backdrop of President Trump’s campaign of deportation, this film pointedly asks what the American dream really offers gig workers lured by the false promise of advancement.Interracial tensions bubble, a problematic romance between a new waitress and a troubled bad-boy chef arises, soliloquies crescendo. Where language plays a central role in L’Histoire and On Falling, compounding the alienation of adapting to a foreign environment and the daily pressures of code-switching, La Cocina makes light humour of such moments. During rush hour, chefs exchange a steady barrage of expletives in Spanish, French and Arabic, a comedic chorus that flattens the complexity of various diasporas into banter.When Pedro, the protagonist, cooks a traditional meal for his waitress girlfriend Julia using the Mexican ingredient hoja santa, the scene is filmed in saccharine close-up, bringing to mind a TikTok ASMR cooking video. But such metaphors for the ache of diasporic exile pin too much meaning on to single moments. La Cocina’s better scenes come as a group of waitresses leave a chaotic, loud, Cherry Coke-flooded kitchen to serve diners who are oblivious to the chaos. Ruizpalacios neatly highlights the distance between two vastly separate worlds — those of the consumer and the worker.Sometimes, a director’s attempt at representation can even have real-world consequences. Striving for authenticity, French director Boris Lojkine cast Abou Sangaré, a non-professional actor, as the lead in L’Histoire de Souleymane. During the production, Sangaré had not yet secured his papers, but since then he has won a best actor award at Cannes and been granted a visa to work as a mechanic in France. Yet such Cinderella stories are rare exceptions.Watching such bracingly realist stories of immigrant labour can be devastating. So it’s refreshing to revisit earlier films that take a different direction. French comedy Un dessert pour Constance (1981) by seminal Angolan filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, for example, explores the lives of two Senegalese balayeurs (street sweepers) in Paris. Rather than wallow in their solitude, however, Maldoror takes a whimsical approach to representing community solidarity as the men memorise a French cookbook and outsmart their local competitors to win a cooking prize. Rather than direct representation, the supernatural can also offer space for contemplation. A shining example is Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), which traces the ordeals of Senegalese migrants who disappear at sea with a surprising turn into ghost story.The moral didacticism of recent contemporary films perhaps requires us to imagine new modes of storytelling, where politics is embedded into forms that open up space for the imagination, for speculation, beyond the much overused concept of “representation”. Visibility, after all, should be the starting point, not the ultimate goal. ‘La Cocina’ is in UK cinemas from March 28
