Migration through movies. Twenty years of filmography in Europe

Recently, thanks to the increased presence of hot demographical topics on the Internet and the media, demographic themes have become accessible to and enjoyed by a wider public. Among non scientific fields, film production is particularly interesting because it represents a means of communication with a strong cultural impact. The aim of our work is to investigate in what way migration has been represented in a procedure that is not the traditional one of scientific research: following a quantitative approach, we intend to look through the European film production of the last twenty years to see the image of the migrant and of the phenomenon of migration that is transmitted in the destination countries.
The first step was the creation of a specific Database on European films on Migratory topics (EMFD). The second step consisted of carrying out multivariate statistical analysis that showed how the representation of migration is very close to reality.
The work carried out highlights a new perspective for socio-demographic studies, though there still remains the problem of constructing exhaustive qualitative and quantitative databases. The value of this contribution lies in having taken the first step in this direction.