Performing Borderscapes: Spatial Subjectivities and Differential Inclusion in Tori et Lokita

This paper analyzes Tori et Lokita (2022, Dardenne brothers) as a cinematic borderscape—a space where spatiality, power, and subjectivity intersect through the lived experiences of undocumented migration. Drawing from Sandra Ponzanesi’s postcolonial feminist film theory and the concept of borderscapes articulated by Mezzadra and Neilson, the film is interpreted as a multilayered representation of how legal, racial, and symbolic boundaries converge to shape precarious geographies of exclusion and exploitation. Lokita, a teenage girl denied refugee status, embodies the tension of differential inclusion: she is physically present within Europe but denied legal recognition and social rights. Her existence unfolds across infra-legal, informal spaces—restaurant basements, underground plantations, ventilation ducts, and infrastructural peripheries. These transitory environments, though absent from dominant spatial imaginaries, function as key frontiers of migration control and labor exploitation in contemporary capitalism. These are not neutral settings but active sites of governance and resistance. The film presents the city as a space where institutional mechanisms of control and informal survival strategies coexist. Through embodied practices, migrants like Lokita reconfigure the urban environment, negotiating their mobility, legality, and visibility under the constraints of securitization. Tori et Lokita challenges the binary distinction between refugee and economic migrant by dramatizing the performative nature of legal categories and migration narratives. It critiques how borders operate not only geographically but symbolically and legally—producing “excess” bodies marked for invisibility and disposability. The film foregrounds the human costs of these bordering regimes while resisting their dehumanizing effects. Ultimately, Tori et Lokita reveals how cinema, as both a site of representation and experience, can humanize borderscapes—offering alternative imaginaries of belonging, subjectivity, and rights in a transnational age marked by the compression of mobility and the reconfiguration of citizenship.