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Refugees played a central role in public discourse in the past decade, however, self-representations were marginal. In this article, I analyze the documentary My Escape / Meine Flucht, which portrays the flight of 15 people based on footage from their mobile phones on their journey and interviews. Starting from Foucault's concept of the heterotopia, I approach the Mediterranean Sea as a place in which different power regimes intersect, engage and compete. The self-representation of border-crossing makes the enacted power on refugees visible and challenges common framings of refugees and border-crossing. I pick up the argument that the rise in migration in 2015 offers a healing potential which could mirror the reality in the "Global South" to a European Union (EU) public. I argue that self-representations in media reveal the contradictions in the self-imagination of the EU and its reality. Yet their impact remains limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on theories of bordering and mediated witnessing to examine a documentary film that mediates migrants' experiences of bordering in Europe. My analysis of Under den samme himmel/Days of Hope shows how the film captures the multiplicity of bordering practices, from geographical to socio-cultural borderings. The analysis is informed by watching and discussing the film in an immigrant detention facility in Finland with people who experienced and eye-witnessed experiences similar to those depicted in the film. This creates a sense of co-presence of the experiential landscapes in the border zones, and the film invites viewers to consider borders not as lines in the landscape, but as zones and as a form of practice that has consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]