Lorenzo Piccoli, Part-time Assistant Professor at the Migration Policy Centre and the School of Transnational Governance, explores these questions through an original global dataset of more than 500 documentaries, films, and television series about migration released between 1940 and 2024.
For decades, migration has been a central theme in cinema—adventures, journeys in search of a better life, and the struggles of crossing borders recur across countless films—but research on how it is depicted has often been fragmented, limited to specific countries or genres. To fill this gap, Lorenzo Piccoli has created a unique database spanning 85 years, encompassing topics from forced displacement, human trafficking, and diaspora life to labour migration, integration, return journeys, and undocumented migration.
The project, which has been in the making for nearly a decade, sheds light on the cultural imagination of migration through its portrayal in cinema and offers a practical tool for introducing migration-related topics through film.
“The original idea came to me almost ten years ago when I was working for the research project ‘On the Move’ at the University of Neuchatel, where I organised a migration film club,” Lorenzo said. “It was there that I noticed just how differently migration can be portrayed on screen. Two films in particular stayed with me: The Swissmakers, a comedy exploring the process of becoming Swiss, and Dheepan, an action drama about the asylum process in France, centred on an unusual Sri Lankan hero.”
While stuck in bed recovering from a minor surgery, Lorenzo had plenty of time to watch films, and he used it to turn an idea into an original database and a research article that was published in the journal Migration Studies, and selected as the Editor’s Choice piece for the March 2026 issue.
The first step was to set clear criteria for which films and TV works to include, since migration—understood as any movement across borders or within a country, regardless of legal status, voluntariness, cause, or duration—offers potentially endless stories. Lorenzo focused on works distributed through recognised channels such as cinemas, streaming platforms, or film festivals, and excluded self-produced content without formal distribution.
After analysing eight decades of films, two important patterns emerged. First, a North–bound bias: Most films show movement toward Europe and North America, even though most global migration is South–South or intra-regional. The database also shows a strong concentration of stories taking place in the United States and Europe, and generally in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese.
Second, in the last 20 years, the dominant narratives revolve around dramatic border crossings, forced displacement, and undocumented migration, while everyday migration stories are far less visible.
“Earlier films from the 1940s to the 1980s were largely about labour migration, the process of integration or social inclusion, and internal migration within countries. Contemporary movies tend to focus on dramatic journeys marked by danger or by the experience of irregularity. This growing emphasis on crisis, often centered on movement toward Europe or North America, tends to portray migration as a spectacle and sideline the more ordinary, diverse realities of human movement,” Lorenzo explained.
This emphasis on dramatic, crisis-driven stories could lead to a specific representation of the phenomenon of migration and to the creation of an unconscious bias. They probably also attract larger audiences due to their spectacular elements. Recent examples of this are movies like One Battle After Another, which recently won several prizes at the Oscars, or The Swimmers, a global hit on Netflix in 2023.
In this context, the database’s listing and categorisation of films encourages viewers to look beyond the spectacle. It invites a fresh perspective on migration, prompting to revisit classics like Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), and Lost in Translation (2003), and also to examine how recent productions such as Mo (2022) and Io Capitano (2023) frame migration stories.
Users can filter entries by title, release year, setting and region, original language, director, format, and theme, making it a flexible resource for students, educators, and anyone interested in using movies in public discussion.
“The movie that I have used most often in class is The Green Border. It represents the situation on the border between Poland and Belarus and shows how migration policies can turn human lives into pawns due to geopolitical tensions,” added Lorenzo.
The database is a live resource that will be updated periodically and contributions are welcome. Lorenzo added, “In the future, we could expand the study to look at how films tell these stories, for example looking at the visual language of film, the main characters, and the audience reception.”
Ultimately, this new resource underscores the powerful role of cultural production in shaping public perceptions. At a time when migration remains high on political and social agendas, both the database and the analysis open up new ways of understanding how migration is represented, and its implications for policymaking.
Explore the Migration Movies Database at the Migration Policy Centre’s website and access the related academic article entitled ‘Migration representation in movies from 1940 to 2024: The spectacle of human mobility and the North-bound bias’.
Lorenzo Piccoli coordinates the teaching and training activities of the Migration Policy Centre together with the School of Transnational Governance. His research focuses on the governance of migrant populations and their inclusion in social rights.