This PhD research joins the growing interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with the relationship between migration and media by focusing on the ethical demands of first-person voices in contemporary documentary. First-person filmmaking, as I argue in this dissertation, comprises an everyday practice that is integral to migrants’ negotiation of various bordering mechanisms in Europe towards more sustaining ways of sharing the world with others. This raises two questions: How can first-person voices negotiate the confining forces of the European border regime to envision and enact alternative configurations of the everyday? And what are the ethically salient aspects of the collaborative labour involved in the production of first-person voices? To answer these questions, I draw from critical border studies, affect theory, and film-ethics to offer an audio-visual and production analysis of a corpus of films that together address diverse experiences of migration in Europe, including the decision to migrate, the migration journey itself, and the experiences of displacement and belonging.

With this theoretical and methodological backdrop, I examine how first-person voices interrogate the various impasses created by the European border regime’s confinement of migrants’ knowledge production, mobility, inclusion and belonging. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that first-person voices enact migrants’ epistemic rights by defying the European border regime’s discursive practices; the right to autonomy of migration by grappling with the processes of migrant interpellation by the European border regime; the right to opacity by resisting the racialising, homogenising and reductive forces of the European border regime; and the right to in-betweenness by refusing the European border regime’s conflation of belonging with a singular location. In addition, on the basis of interviews with the directors of the films in corpus, I articulate how the process of expressing a first-person voice involves an extensive negotiation of vulnerability, trust, as well as contractual and creative rights. Overall, this dissertation elaborates how first-person voices in contemporary documentary advance a cinematic ethics of migration that is invested in transgressing the confinement effected by the contemporary coloniality of migration in Europe.