Open Access“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The Promise of Europe and Female Identity in Francesca (2009)
Author(s) -
Adina Baya,
Irina Diana Mădroane
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
gender studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.104
H-Index - 1
eISSN - 2286-0134
pISSN - 1583-980X
DOI - 10.2478/genst-2020-0008
Subject(s) - romanian , narrative , movie theater , identity (music) , repertoire , context (archaeology) , theme (computing) , agency (philosophy) , sociology , gender studies , space (punctuation) , premise , character (mathematics) , articulation (sociology) , aesthetics , media studies , history , political science , art , literature , social science , epistemology , linguistics , law , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , computer science , operating system , politics
Starting from the premise that intra-EU migration has generated a repertoire of representations, narratives and stances in Romanian public imagination, within a transnational context, the present article explores an area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date: Romanian New Cinema films that tackle this theme. The analysis focuses on “Francescaˮ (Bobby Păunescu, 2009), a film centred on a female character who is on the verge of deciding whether to emigrate or not. It examines how female identity and agency are shaped in connection to symbolic constructions of the “West” as a destination space for Romanian migrants, through modalities of expression specific to the New Romanian Cinema.