Going West: Migration and the Post-communist World in Recent European Film

This article examines a number of recent European films that tackle the issue of migration from former communist countries to Western Europe. The key films discussed in the article all seek to show how the West is constructed as an object of desire for the inhabitants of the former communist bloc and how the protagonists’ fantasies of the West are sustained by ideology even in the face of the harsh realities of contemporary capitalism. Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian model of ideology is applied to the film texts in order to highlight these issues, particularly his notion of “traversing fantasy.” The article concludes by examining the position of the audience in relation to this process.