Since 2000, a growing number of films set in Paris have focused an empathic lens on the experiences of those with foreign origins in the French capital city. These cinematic works have highlighted in various ways the diversity of cultures, beliefs and languages that come together in this location, often resulting in misunderstandings and occasionally leading to violence. Four full-length feature films in particular embrace an activist stance in their portrayal of Paris as a location where individuals from elsewhere often suffer due to their perceived differences. Whether it is a question of the intersecting fates of Malian or Romanian immigrants in the French capital in Michael Haneke's Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages/Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000, France/Germany/Romania), the life-or-death situation of an Algerian immigrant who has been forced into prostitution in Coline Serreau's Chaos (2001, France), the purposely hilarious socio-political activism of a young woman whose father is an immigrant from Algeria and whose newfound love is of Jewish descent in Michel Leclerc's Le nom des gens/The Names of Love (2010, France), or the spontaneous kindness a witness to a fatal hit-and-run accident shows to the Moldavian victim's wife in Catherine Corsini's Trois mondes/Three Worlds (2012, France), it is evident that these filmmakers have turned an attentive eye in their recent movies to the injustices that mark the experiences of those from beyond French borders whose trajectories have brought them to the City of Light.

It may be unsurprising that the Austrian filmmaker Haneke chose to bring immigrant populations into the limelight in his first French film, a work that integrated no fewer than seven languages into its composition. But it is significant that the other three films in my corpus are French-only productions by French-born directors, all of which focus on foreigners in multilingual cinematic works conceived and produced in France. My conception of ‘activist cinéma-monde’ can be seen in relation to a larger movement that Martin O’Shaughnessy identifies as a ‘re-emergence of commitment’ characterising many French films after 1995 (2007: 5).