TWO MODES
Immigration cinema has two modes. The first is the immigrant experience as seen from outside - the documentary impulse, the political argument, the social document that represents people without presuming to inhabit their perspective. The second is the immigrant experience as seen from inside - the specific texture of living in a language that isn't your first, in a culture that wasn't built for you, in the permanent state of negotiation between what you came from and where you are. The films below are almost entirely the second mode.
THE CONTEMPORARY FILMS
Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020): A Korean-American family in 1980s Arkansas, farming a plot of land in a state that has almost no Korean community. The film is most precisely about the gap between the first-generation immigrant's vision of what America is supposed to be - the freedom, the land, the possibility - and the specific material difficulty of the place he has actually arrived at. Steven Yeun's performance is the career best of a performer who has several career bests. The grandmother who arrives from Korea and refuses to be the grandmother the children expect is the formal heart of the film.
The Farewell (Lulu Wang, 2019): A Chinese-American family gathering in China to see their grandmother, who has been diagnosed with terminal illness and told nothing about it - the family's decision to maintain the pretense is a culturally specific argument about collective wellbeing versus individual autonomy. The film is formally a comedy and formally a grief film simultaneously. Awkwafina's performance is the most restrained and formally precise of her career. A film about the specific generational and cultural dissonance of being between two places.
Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015): Three Sri Lankan strangers assume the identities of a family to get refugee status in France, and then have to become the family they're pretending to be. The Palme d'Or winner. A film about the double displacement of the refugee - from the country of origin and from the self you were in it - and about the specific violence the French banlieue imposes on people who arrived looking for safety.
THE CLASSICS
El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983): A Guatemalan brother and sister fleeing political violence, crossing Mexico, crossing the US border. The film that most completely established the Central American immigrant experience as a cinematic subject. Formally straightforward by contemporary standards; emotionally direct in a way that makes its formal simplicity feel correct rather than inadequate.
Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018): A twelve-year-old Lebanese boy suing his parents for bringing him into the world they couldn't adequately protect him in. The film about Syrian refugee children in Beirut and the specific way statelessness - having no legal identity, no document that says you exist - produces a particular kind of invisibility. Shot with non-professional actors, many of whom shared the circumstances of the characters they played.
THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE
Burning an Illusion (Menelik Shabazz, 1981): A British Black romance set in London - the film most formally concerned with what it means to build a life in a country that doesn't yet accept your presence as unremarkable. The British cinema tradition almost entirely ignored the Black British experience until Shabazz and the films around him in the early 1980s. On BFI Player.
My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985): A young British-Pakistani man and his white working-class childhood friend, in Thatcher's London. The film that most directly addressed the complexity of identity in the British immigrant community - not the simple narrative of integration or rejection, but the specific negotiation of class, race, sexuality, and what each generation inherits from the one before. Hanif Kureishi's screenplay.
THE CJK THREAD
The films about the CJK immigrant experience specifically - Chinese in North America, Korean in Japan, the Zainichi Korean community, the Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia - constitute a distinct tradition with its own formal concerns. The Required Watching Guide to CJK cinema has the full thread for anyone following the diaspora films specifically.
The British cinema tradition almost entirely ignored the Black British experience until Shabazz and the films around him in the early 1980s.