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The focus of the three national cases surveyed has been on: Romania as a predominantly migrant-sending society; Greece as a predominantly migrant-receiving society, and FYROM as in between a migrant-sending and a migrant-receiving society, most often represented as a transit space.
The analysed texts have foregrounded topical issues in the wider context of communicated concepts and interpretations on migration, such as: the risks and costs of (il)legal migration (Romanian film and press, Greek film and press, FYROM film and press); labour migration (Romanian film and press; Greek film and press); obtaining citizenship through marriage (Romanian film, Greek film and press, FYROM film); sex work/trafficking for sexual exploitation (Romanian film and press, Greek film, FYROM press); childabandonment (Romanian film and press, Greek film); criminality (Romanian film and press, Greek film and press, FYROM press); inter-/intra-ethnic conflict/divergence (Romanian press, Greek film and press, FYROMfilm and press); the gradual extinction of local cultures through emigration (Romanian film, Greek film). What may be inferred from the above is the fact that migration is most often represented as a disquieting experience, with the very few success stories presented incapable of opposing the dominant idea advertised, that of preserving imaginary borders and geographical spaces.
Considering the textsʼ politics of gender representation, the experiences of migrant women and men are differently recorded by the two media in the three national cases. Thus, in the Romanian feature films and the FYROM written press stress is laid upon a predominantly feminine cast of migrant characters, proof of the increased feminization of migration. In Greek feature films, documentaries and written press, as well as in the Romanian documentaries, equal attention is devoted to men and women migrants, which offers a gender-balanced view of migration. In the Romanian written press the tendency is to provide a gender-neutral profile of the migrant, whereas the FYROM feature films and documentaries foreground male migrant figures only. This might be indicative of the societal changes, the institutional realities and the cultural frames that define the three spaces in which the phenomenon has been analysed, but are operative not only locally but also at a global level.
