FROM SUITCASE CHILDREN TO EURO-ORPHANS: CINEMATIC PORTRAYALS

Abstract

This study analyses three European films about children left behind by their parents in their home countries due to labour migration. Developed in the German language in the second half of the twentieth century as Kofferkinder (suitcase children), this concept has been called Euro-orphans since the twenty-first century. Although neological concepts and time-space differ, the experiences and traumas of the children and parents concerned are similar. From the 1950s onwards, such family disintegrations affected a noteworthy part of the population immigrating to Germany and other European countries from Greece and Italy and the 1960s onwards, from Turkey. Later, migrant parents from Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Poland left their children with relatives, neighbours or in childcare facilities, which has become an essential sociological fact regarding the migration phenomenon that prevents family reunification and causes lifelong trauma, especially for children. With changing social, political and economic conditions, migration causes children left behind not to receive parental care in the long term. This study reveals the glocality of the issue through a sociological analysis of three films about migration from Turkey, Romania and Poland, selected according to judgemental sampling. According to the findings, Sandstern (2018) depicts the reunification of a Turkish suitcase boy with his parents in Germany and the challenges of his otherness and alienation from a distant history of the 1980s. Calea Dunării (2013) and I am Kuba (2015) tell more contemporary dramas of Euro-Orphans. In conclusion, while the selected films depict children left behind, migration here has an involuntary character as a way of escaping poverty in different times and geographies.