‘Going Home’: mobility and return journeys in French and Spanish road movies

Frequently understood as a typical American film genre, the matrix of the road movie is adapted by film-makers of national cinemas across the world. As a modern audio-visual continuation of the literary tradition of journeys of initiation, this genre is an ideal format for the cinematic depiction of uprooting as well as for the search for individual or trans/national identity in time and space. Dealing with the return journeys of the protagonists through France and Spain towards the Maghreb countries Morocco and Algeria, a comparative analysis of Exiles, by Algiers-born French director Tony Gatlif, and Hassan’s Way, by Spanish film-makers Fran Araújo and Ernesto de Nova, explores the categories of identity and mobility, as those expose the temporal and spatial structures which determine ideological attributions to the aesthetics and the filmic narration of nomadic postcolonial European road movies.