Marginality on the Move: The Perpetual Exile of the Migrant Journey in Tony Gatlif’s <i>Exils</i> (2004)

This article examines the marginality and perpetual exile of the migrant journey as represented in French-Algerian director Tony Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils , for which he was awarded the Best Director prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. On the one hand, Exils may be read as a road movie in reverse. It could be considered a deliberate shift by the director, and by the film’s protagonists, away from the traditional centre of French consciousness—Paris—to the periphery of French national historical consciousness, Algeria. Gatlif suggests that, for his protagonists to arrive at self-fulfilment, they must flee the centrifugal pull of Paris—and with it French integrationism—to embark on the reverse of the typical South-to-North migrant journey, by venturing on foot, by train and by boat, often as stowaways, across borders and potentially threatening landscapes in order to find their centre at the periphery. On the other hand, this article argues that the apparent reverse migrant journey is in fact something of a mirage, as the film represents an exile from a place in which the film’s protagonists never fully arrived. Gatlif’s claims to cultural authenticity as a French-Algerian auteur are also questioned, as well as the dynamics of Western exoticism represented in critical responses to the film.