Towards the Right to Cinematic Opacity: Navigating Transparency, Migration and Whiteness in Europe

This article traces the relationship between, on the one hand, the aesthetic values of opacity and transparency, and, on the other hand, the ethics and politics of Europe's regulation of migration. I approach transparency as inherently tied to white hegemony, which results in an aesthetic regime that keeps authority centralised, meaning stabilised, and identity regulated. An aesthetic of opacity, in contrast, resists these normative demands, instead claiming one's right to opacity: the right to preserve the irreducible singularity of one's identity in the face of white hegemony. I argue that Europa, “Based on a True Story” (2019) embodies Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza's process of navigating the regime of transparency to advance migrants’ right to opacity as a mode of resistance against the colonial and racial ordering of Europe's contemporary border regime. Combining documentary and fiction, Europa portrays Ruhorahoza's own experience of exclusion as framing a fictional story of illegalisation and deportation at the centre of which is Simon (Oris Erhuero), a Nigerian migrant in Britain whose asylum request has been rejected. By bringing Édouard Glissant's work on opacity, relationality and errantry into conversation with Europa's portrayal of the position of migrants in contemporary Europe, this article articulates the ethico-political stakes of Europa's aesthetic of opacity, as advanced by the film's interstitiality regarding cinematic norms, a first-person plural mode of narration and the mobilisation of the spectral metaphor . At the core of Europa's claim to opacity, I propose, is a call for a new form of identification in Europe, as a relation among opacities beyond national frontiers.