Presented by Stefan Solomon, Visiting Fellow in Film Studies and New Media at ANU, as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series.

On 15 April, 2013, Chechen brothers Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated two bombs near the finish line of the annual Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding over 200 others. Although more than two years have transpired since the attack, there is still much speculation about the Tsarnaev brothers' motivations, and of their family's disputed ties to Chechnya.

While coverage of the event and its repercussions spread across a variety of media, depictions of young, male Chechen migrants have also emerged in several recent European films: Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys (2013), Sudabeh Mortezai’s Macondo (2014), and Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man (2014) have all revolved around boys and adolescent men displaced from the small Russian republic.

This paper examines the ways in which migrants, especially from Chechnya, occupy an overdetermined position, viewed simultaneously as potential economic citizens or terrorist threats. In their respective films, Campillo, Mortezai, and Corbijn manage the layers of meaning imposed on the isolated Chechen in a number of interesting ways, with each director thinking through the various encumbrances of stateless people. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s work Terrorist Assemblages, I will consider what cinema might tell us about the status of the unhomely migrant in Europe.

Stefan Solomon is a Visiting Fellow in Film Studies and New Media at ANU. He is the co-editor of William Faulkner in the Media Ecology (LSU Press, 2015), and has just completed work on a book manuscript, William Faulkner: From Hollywood to Mississippi (forthcoming with UGA Press).