There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema

The Wizard of Oz brought many now-iconic tropes into popular culture: the yellow brick road, ruby slippers and Oz. But this book begins with Dorothy and her legacy as an archetypal touchstone in cinema for the child journeying far from home. In There’s No Place Like Home, distinguished film scholar Stephanie Hemelryk Donald offers a fresh interpretation of the migrant child as a recurring figure in world cinema. Displaced or placeless children, and the idea of childhood itself, are vehicles to examine migration and cosmopolitanism in films such as Le Ballon Rouge, Sammy Going South and Le Havre. Surveying fictional and documentary film from the post-war years until today, the author shows how the child is a guide to themes of place, self and being in world cinema.