Migration a major theme at Cannes Film Festival

CANNES, France: They set off with dreams of a new life only to find that peril, exploitation, loneliness and an aching rootlessness often await them.
Migration, one of the great issues of globalization but one that until now has been poorly explored at the movies, has emerged as a major theme at the Cannes Film Festival.
A frontrunner for the coveted Palme d’Or on Sunday is Tian Zhu Ding, a brutal portrayal of peasants who head to the cities for work in China of today.
People struggle to keep their souls as they work in garment factories owned by greedy foreign bosses, and flounder in their relationships with distant families. To live with dignity, violence is their only choice — a theme that also runs through “wuxia” martial arts movies.
“The wuxia films are what gave me the inspiration,” director Jia Zhangke told AFP. “There is a spirit of nobility which runs through these films, and it is the same one you will see in some people in today’s society.”
Desperation and violence also lie at the core of “The Immigrant,” in which Marion Cotillard stars as a Polish immigrant, who arrives at New York’s Ellis Island in the 1920s and becomes ensnared in bad company.
Director James Gray said he wanted to make the movie as a period piece, reminding people today that immigrants may be despised when they arrive, but they eventually become accepted as part of a nation’s wealth.
“Immigration is one of the most important aspects of a dynamic culture,” he told a press conference. “It enriches a society. It doesn’t debase society.”
Other films, also well-received, touch on the plight of clandestine immigrants.
Stop-Over, a 149-minute documentary by Iranian-Swiss Kaveh Bakhtiari in the Directors’ Fortnight screenings, follows a group of Iranian men who are smuggled across the border from Turkey to Greece but can go no further.
La Jaula de Oro (The Cage of Gold), by Mexican-based Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez, tells the odyssey of teenagers desperate to cross into the United States.
Quemada-Diez said he was drawn to make the film after speaking to migrants who had braved violence, theft and arrest in their quest for the land of gold.
“I felt their outrage in the face of global injustice, in the face of impassive governments,” he said. “I had the feeling that the stories they told me had to be told to others... to make people reflect.”
“Born Somewhere” by Mohamed Hamidi explores the ravaged connections that come from migration as a young Frenchman returns to his family in Algeria.
He meets a cousin who thinks of only one thing: shrugging off the poverty and hassle of life in North Africa and living in France.
Over the last decade, thousands of economic migrants have arrived on the shores of Europe, and hundreds have drowned en route, sometimes ditched by their smugglers.