Screening Series: In a Displaced World

A film series highlighting cinematic engagements with forced displacement, border regimes, and the political economies of migration. The films move beyond humanitarian lenses to reframe the so-called migration “crisis.”

EV 1.615 | November 14, 2025 | 3:30 PM

 

Screening 2 – Per Un Figlio (2016)

Sunita, a middle-aged Sri Lankan woman, lives with her teenage son on the outskirts of a northern Italian city where she works as a caregiver. The relationship between mother and son is fraught with tension and silence. Having grown up in Italy, the boy is a cultural hybrid his mother struggles to understand, as she fights to live in a country to which she does not want to belong.


Facilitator: Elena Benelli

Elena Benelli is Professor of Italian at the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics, where she teaches courses on contemporary Italian cinema, contemporary Italian literature, and Italian feminism. In collaboration with Professor Grace Russo-Bullaro, she has edited the volume Shifting and Shaping a National Identity: Transnational Writers and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today. She has published several book chapters and articles on migrant writers and contemporary Italian fiction and cinema. Her current research interests include migrant literature and cinema in Italy.