Islands and Borders

Urban Suburbs and Plural Identities in Gianfranco Rosi’s Cinema

Abstract

The essay looks into the documentary cinema of Gianfranco Rosi interpreting it as an investigation of spaces and frontier communities, that are revealed through the predominance of urban periphery’s places or of the abandoned areas and the fascination towards the look of plurality and eccentric subjectivities. His entire cinema is, in fact, dominated by the reason of the border, which establishes in the overall corpus of films a peculiar and recurrent representative and dramaturgical interest in geographies and existences on the margins: the Ganges River, the Californian community of Slab City, the border between Mexico and the United States of America, Rome’s GRA ring road, the island of Lampedusa.