Picturing the Other: Teaching Migration and Community with Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre

Aki Kaurismäki's 2011 film Le Havre offers a fruitful lens through which to explore questions of community and belonging, political engagement, and the sociopolitical question of the migrant crisis in Europe. Because of the relative simplicity of its form and language, the film is accessible to a broad range of language learners and so can be adapted to classrooms from the elementary to advanced level. This article proposes pedagogical ideas that focus not only on teaching the issue of migration, but also on how to engage students with questions of community, borders, the ethics of representation, and moral responsibility.