Outcasts, Fugitives, and Migrants: Mobility and the Social Production of Space

Abstract

Of the final three thematic chapters of the study focusing on the cinematic representations of transitional post-socialist Romanian society, this chapter focuses on the social production of space displayed through narratives about outcasts, fugitives, and migrants. Moving across physical space, their mobility becomes an important social signifier in the sense that, after the geographic and political isolation of the state socialist years, the opportunity and the freedom to move became a primary tool in the identity construction of the post-socialist citizen. In the films, disoriented characters hesitantly cross labyrinthine social settings, move in-between urban and rural spaces, and in the process redraw the patterns of performative spatial practice.