Private Stories, Public Issues: Representations of Migration in Angus Macqueen’s The Last Peasants. Journeys

Abstract

The documentary trilogy The Last Peasants (2003), directed and produced by Angus Macqueen, seeks to reveal the „private stories‟ behind Romanians‟ illegal migration to
Western Europe against the background of major transformations in the post-Communist Romanian society still in transition at the turn of the twenty-first century. The paper
focuses on one of the films of the trilogy, Journeys, which is the most explicit in its representation of the dangers that Romanian migrants had to face, prior to Romania‟s
joining the European Union, while crossing borders to „go West‟ in hope of living their „Western European dream‟. The exploration of the rhetorical and narrative strategies
employed by the British director in this filmic text aims, therefore, at casting light on how images of the sending Romanian society, the Western European hosts and the Romanian
diaspora are constructed, in an attempt to challenge the audiences and to raise their awareness of the need for a better understanding of such a complex social phenomenon as
migration, as well as for the change in attitudes in host-migrant interactions.