Eavesdropping from the threshold: childhood and borders in contemporary film

Positioned at “the threshold between nature and culture” (Randall 2017, xii) and thought to be in a state of transition towards adulthood, children are often conceived as liminal figures. In many films, eavesdropping—those moments in which children sneak into liminal spaces, and they observe adults without being seen—becomes a formal strategy through which such sense of liminality is coded in spatial terms. Focused on the representation of borders as sites of socio-political struggle, this paper reads children’s eavesdropping as a global aesthetic trope that shapes the social and spatial articulation of cinematic borders in specific ways. It considers two European films about children who grow up in borderly spaces: A Ciambra (Jonas Carpignano, 2017), set in Italy’s southern region of Calabria; and L’île rouge (Robin Campillo, 2023), set in a French military base in Madagascar. In both films, children negotiate social, ethnic, and national differences as they navigate the borderscape. In spatial terms, they are often positioned at thresholds (doors, windows, walls) from which they eavesdrop on the world of adults. By exploring the function of those thresholds in children’s spatial trajectories—whether they are dividing lines, contact zones, or vantage points from which to scrutinise the unequal power relations around them—this paper presents the border as a process that is performed into being through practices of division and encounter, and which works both as a “site of the production of sovereign power [as one] of resistances and struggles” (Brambilla and Jones 2020, 3).