Economic Refugees

To begin with I want to say I loved this movie.  It was beautiful and tragic and mind boggling on so many levels.  Everything from the political stage to the more intimate setting of the village kept me interested and invested in the outcome of the characters.  After watching the film and reading Martin and Yaquinto’s article on Diaspora it was not challenging to make connections between the two.  In the film I think the more common version of Diaspora is easily seen.  Refugees are fleeing conflict in their own homelands and seeking reprieve elsewhere.  And it was interesting to note that when the village leader meets another Kurdish man he asks him, “Are you an Iranian Kurd or an Iraqi Kurd?”  This to me highlighted an important fact that even though these people had a village they were not quite at home in this country and that the Kurdish people have been swept around and separated.  But the authors also mention that Diaspora includes the “…internationalization of capital and the labor market…” Satellite has his village children dig up American mines.  He doesn’t even want them to bother with mines from other countries.  What’s fascinating about this is that even though Satellite has no connections with any Americans in the film he knows that even discarded American mines are worth more than anything his village could produce.  This illustrates that Western countries have made certain people economic refugees by forcing them out of the market unless they are willing to deal with the goods of the “invaders” as it were.  Also the massive satellite dish the village buys looked eerily similar to dishes I have seen early in the days of satellite television.  What one American family could afford to buy, an entire village had to band together to purchase.  It was really a shocking image for me to see and one that struck home the idea of this economic Diaspora.