Following other advances in international film movements, namely Third and Fourth Cinema, we propose the concept of Fifth Cinema to refer to a composite of audio-visual outputs developed primarily by refugees and/or enabled with their interests and stories at heart. Although the experience of forcible displacement and expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, Fifth Cinema exhibits certain similarities. It is a cinema that is nomadic, insecure, fragmented, displaced, accented, and hybrid. Emotionally and politically fraught, it is emergency cinema, getting unheard voices out there. It is a ‘smart cinema’ enabled by the spread of digital technologies making it instantaneous, dispensable yet indispensable as a record of a millennial phenomenon. By no means a concerted social movement, it is certainly about reflecting on the surge of individual movements and their filmic outputs, occasionally collective as the result of shared endeavours and co-productions. In this article, we chart out some key features and proponents of Fifth Cinema as an ‘open corpus’ and as part of making a political statement: that refugee conditions and contributions are appreciated, valorised and supported with the means to represent themselves, creatively, interculturally and politically through the (co-)production of their own stories.
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Kaur et al. (2018) studied this question.