The two concepts of "migration" and "media," whose complex interdependency is critically reflected in this anthology, are all too often related to each other in a problematic way: Media productions are seen as mimetic images of social and political events, which results in both a theoretical and a political problem. In such a view, it is implicitly claimed, they negotiate problems of the everyday coexistence of their audience as well as questions of belonging and identity directly on the level of representation. 1 This claim is problematic not only in terms of film theory, but also in political terms, for two main reasons: First, because this thinking is based on the presupposition that one can extract cinematic figures as independent entities from the moving image and match them with pre-film re alities-this is the theoretical problem. On the other hand, it is problematic because the idea of a mimetic relation assumes that there is a secure, non-mediated knowledge about what the reality of migration is - that is the political problem.