The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience

An austere and emotionally exacting portrait of love under siege, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 masterpiece explores the intersection of age, race and immigrant marginalization in postwar Germany. Emmi, a widowed German cleaning lady in her 60s, falls for Ali, a Moroccan migrant worker decades her junior. The romance enrages the anständig members of Munich society — those guilt-ridden former Nazis who have let fear eat through their souls — including Emmi’s own grown-up children (Fassbinder has a showstopping cameo as her virulently racist son-in-law). This is a simple story stripped down to the barest essentials — Fassbinder dashed it off in a 15-day shoot in between making bigger-budget feature Martha and Effi Briest — that avoids melodrama to focus on the quiet dignity of those who choose love over prejudice and contempt. 

This time-jumping satire — starring Seth Rogen in a dual role as Ben, a Jewish Brooklyn hipster, and Herschel, his miraculously revived great-grandfather, preserved for a century in a vat of brine — sweetly contrasts the stoic resilience of Old World immigrants with the irony-soaked malaise of their descendants. Director Brandon Trost hits the familiar beats of the fish-out-of-water comedy — Herschel, discovering Ben owns 25 pairs of socks, is dumbfounded: “You only have two feet!” — to gently probe the cultural inheritance of a nation of immigrants and the obligation this generation owes to those who went before. 

“In America there are no cats,” sings Fievel Mousekewitz, our rodent hero in this story of a Jewish family of mice that flees Russian pogroms — bloodthirsty felines assisting the antisemitic Cossacks — for the supposed utopia of New York. This feature, from Don Bluth, an animator on The Rescuers (1977) and Pete’s Dragon (1977), might not reach the heights of classic Disney, but it is the first animated family film to tell the Jewish emigrant tale (Steven Spielberg, nearly a decade before Schindler’s List, produced). Bluth also deserves credit for refusing to sugarcoat his story for younger audiences. Fievel’s adventures in America are often harrowing and show the dark side of the American dream. But it’s the songs that carry the day. Anyone who doesn’t tear up at “Somewhere Out There,” Feivel’s distant duet with his sister, should have their cinema citizenship revoked. 

Gurinder Chadha’s breakout film adds spice and soul to the immigrant coming-of-age story with this crowd-pleasing British dramedy about a West London girl from a traditional Sikh family who dares to dream of football stardom. Jess (Parminder Nagra) initially hides her love for the game — and for her Irish coach — from her disapproving parents before finding a way to combine her family’s cultural expectations with the ambitions and expectations of a born-in-Britain teen. It’s all captured perfectly in a standout scene where Chadha deftly cuts between a traditional Sikh wedding and Jess’ action on the pitch. 

Chris Weitz ditches the big-budget bombast of previous films (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Golden Compass) for this more intimate indie effort, the story of Mexican day laborer and single dad Carlos (Demián Bichir, phenomenal), and his struggle to survive, perhaps to prosper, in the shadow world of L.A.’s undocumented. Over the course of a single, very eventful day, Carlos sees his dream of self-employment smashed when his truck — the foundation of his hoped-for gardening business — is stolen, and he and his teenage son Luis (José Julián) set out to find it. With shades of Italian neo-realism — Bicycle Thieves is a clear inspiration — Weitz, whose family is largely Hispanic, shows us the world the undocumented travel, a world that runs parallel to the L.A. of jogging suburbanites and ostentatious wealth, where every stranger is a potential threat, every cop an enemy who could arrest and deport you. 

Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci, the culinary-named siblings Primo and Secondo, are Italian immigrants running an exquisite, and failing, restaurant in 1950s New Jersey, who invest everything — pride, heritage and hope — into a single night’s grand feast that could save their American dream. On the surface, the most delicious of foodie porn — that one-shot scene of Tucci preparing the perfect omelet remains the genre’s high-water mark — on a deeper level, Big Night is the story of a struggle every immigrant has: to hold on to their values and traditions or to assimilate with those of their adopted country. 

Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 landmark feature tells the story of Diouana, a Senegalese domestic worker whose dream of a better life in France curdles into despair. Alternating between Dakar and Antibes, Black Girl was the first sub-Saharan African film to win acclaim in Europe, with its searing indictment of post-colonial racism and its stylistic aplomb. Unable to record sound on location, Sembène dubbed it in afterwards, using an un-synced voiceover that heightens Diouana’s sense of alienation from her own story, as well as lending a dreamlike quality to what is an objectively grim tale of migrant exploitation. 

Saoirse Ronan gives an early, luminous performance in John Crowley’s Brooklyn as Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman navigating homesickness, love and identity in 1950s New York. Based on Colm Tóibín’s novel and adapted by Nick Hornby, the film beautifully captures the tension in the migrant story, between the pull of the past and the promise of the future. An old-fashioned film in the very best way, this quietly elegant gem evokes the dislocation and dignity at the heart of the immigrant experience.

This immigrant epic is no rags-to-riches fairy tale. Brady Corbet’s take on the American dream is clear from the film’s opening shot — an upside-down Statue of Liberty, spotted from his below-deck berth by World War II refugee László Tóth (Adrien Brody in an Oscar-winning performance). A famed Hungarian-Jewish architect, Tóth rebuilds his life and career in America only to be undone by capitalist violence, antisemitism and a philistine culture, all embodied in Guy Pearce’s rich philanthropist Harrison Lee Van Buren, which see migrants as a resource to be mined, and views humanity in terms of ownership and control. 

Wayne Wang’s breakout, made for $22,000, is a whimsical gem of a film set in San Francisco’s Chinatown that manages to be both quasi-documentary and genre parody. The title is a sly joke on the Charlie Chan movies, in which a string of white actors in yellowface played a caricatured Chinese Hawaiian detective, and Wang subverts the thriller genre with his shaggy-dog tale of two cab drivers who go looking for the titular Chan Hung, a friend who owes them money. Replacing Hollywood’s stereotypes with a warmhearted look at actual Chinese Americans, Chan Is Missing stands out not only as a milestone in Asian American cinema, but as one of the best depictions of the subtle complexities and contradictions embedded in any immigrant community anywhere in the world. 

Nagisa Oshima’s fusion of absurdist satire and political polemics is a stylized, but still furious, attack on Japan’s treatment of its Korean minority. R, a Japanese-born Korean man, is sentenced to die but his body refuses to be executed. What we think is a quasi-documentary procedural of crime and punishment morphs into a slapstick, Monty Python-esque lampoon of ethnic stereotypes and unchecked state power. By rendering xenophobic ideology in such frank, just-the-facts terms, Death by Hanging reveals the dark absurdity that lies beneath. 

Stephen Frears’ social thriller peels back the layers of London’s shadow economy, fueled by the sweat and desperation of migrant workers. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Okwe, a doctor in Nigeria, but a porter in London, who, while unclogging a hotel toilet, discovers a human heart stuck in the pipes. Frears nods toward noir and horror, but the genre engine in Dirty Pretty Things is there to drive a story of exploitation and survival among the city’s immigrant population — played by a European all-star cast including Audrey Tautou, Zlatko Buric and Sophie Okonedo. This is their story, with local white characters, including hotel customers and immigration officials, relegated to the sidelines. 

This classic puts a human face on the migrant journey, telling the story of two Guatemalan siblings who flee political violence in their homeland to make the perilous trek to L.A. Director Gregory Nava rejects the docudrama approach in favor of a more poetic take that dials up the visual splendor — the film is at times almost too beautiful — in order to heighten the contrast between the glittering idea of the American dream and the harsh reality of those who come north seeking a better life.

You can nitpick at Norman Jewison’s big-screen adaptation of the iconic Broadway musical. For some it’s too sentimental, too slick, altogether too Hollywood. (Some, in a poke at Jewison, a Canadian-born gentile, feel it is also far too goy.) But in its portrayal of a Jewish village community in pre-Revolutionary Ukraine, Fiddler remains one of the most accessible and, frankly, entertaining stories of the pre-immigrant experience. Israeli actor Topol shines as Tevye, a father caught between tradition and change as his three daughters marry out beneath him. And, as the kids would say, the soundtrack — “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “To Life” — is all bangers. 

Gianfranco Rosi’s Oscar-nominated documentary captures the migrant crisis through parallel lives on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa: the locals, going about their daily routines, as boatload upon boatload of African and Middle Eastern refugees arrive on their shores. With no narration and minimal interviews, Fire at Sea lets the images speak — evoking the silent suffering of the migrants, thousands of whom drown on their journey across the Mediterranean, alongside the cruel indifference and occasional act of selfless heroism of the Europeans they meet. With his ever-patient camera, Rosi, who acts as a one-man crew on his films and spends months embedded with this subjects to gain access and develop trust, presents a quietly radical meditation on Europe’s failure to live up to its own ideals. 

It began with a voice. In Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s groundbreaking animated documentary, that voice belongs to Amin — a pseudonym for the director’s childhood friend, an Afghan refugee who, for the first time, reveals the secrets of his escape and identity. Using a blend of hand-drawn animation and archival footage, Flee tells the harrowing true story of Amin’s flight from Kabul to Moscow to Denmark, his buried trauma, and his struggle to live openly as a gay man. The Sundance winner became the first film to be simultaneously nominated for best animated feature, best documentary and best international feature at the Oscars.

A brutal, sweeping chronicle of ethnic conflict in 19th century Manhattan — between “American Nativists” led by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis gobbling up the scenery in grand guignol magnificence) and the thousands of new Catholic Irish immigrants, led by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Amsterdam — Gangs of New York portrays immigration not as arrival but as ongoing combat. It’s an origin story of a city, and a nation, forged in blood and betrayal, xenophobia and resistance. 

Francis Ford Coppola’s crime epic doubles as an immigrant parable about the corrosion of values across generations. In juxtaposing young Vito Corleone’s arrival in America with Michael’s descent into moral ruin, The Godfather Part II frames assimilation as a Faustian bargain. What begins as a survival story becomes a tragedy of inheritance — where power supplants purpose and legacy becomes a curse.

Agnieszka Holland’s searing dramatization of the refugee crisis on the Belarus-Poland border captures the cruelty of a bureaucratic system weaponizing human lives. Shot in stark black-and-white and driven by righteous anger — and a dose of gallows humor — Green Border toggles between refugees caught in political limbo, Polish border guards and activists risking arrest to help. It’s a visceral cry of protest — and a reminder of how quickly moral clarity collapses at the edge of state lines.

Fatih Akin’s breakout feature tracks the explosive faux marriage between two German Turks: a young woman desperate to flee her conservative family and the self-destructive alcoholic she sees as her escape hatch. Raw, funny and brutal, Head-On is less about immigration than what comes after — how the children of migrants struggle to forge identity when they feel foreign in both the country of their birth and their parents’ homeland. 

Behind its infamous production — Michael Cimino’s epic Western remains shorthand for “box office bomb” — lies a haunting vision of American betrayal. Heaven’s Gate reframes the Western as an immigrant tragedy, depicting European settlers crushed by capitalism, in the form of rich cattle interests, and nativist violence in 1890s Wyoming. The film’s visual grandeur amplifies its moral outrage, capturing both the dream of belonging and the brutality of exclusion. 

Carol Kane earned an Oscar nod for her portrayal of Gitl, a newly arrived Jewish immigrant in 1890s New York, whose devout traditions clash with her Americanized husband. Shot in black-and-white and laced with Yiddish dialogue, Joan Micklin Silver’s intimate debut captures the messy process of assimilation with humor, heartbreak and feminist insight. An indie milestone, Hester Street reframed the immigrant saga through a woman’s eyes.

James Gray channels Hollywood’s golden age melodramas with this operatic peek into the darkest corners of the American dream. Marion Cotillard plays Ewa, a Polish Catholic immigrant detained at Ellis Island, who is forced into prostitution by a manipulative showman (Joaquin Phoenix). Jeremy Renner plays a charming illusionist who promises to take her out West. Gray’s tale of migrant struggles, viscerally evoked in a grimy and grim re-creation of the 1920s Lower East Side, is messy and ambiguous, but Cottilard’s Ewa, with her quiet dignity and unwavering faith, provides hope of redemption. 

Jim Sheridan’s semi-autobiographical drama chronicles an Irish family’s illegal immigration to New York in the 1980s through the wide-eyed perspective of their daughters. The Sullivans — parents Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine, daughters played by real-life siblings Sarah and Emma Bolger — navigate grief, poverty and culture shock in a dilapidated Hell’s Kitchen tenement and form a touching bond with their neighbor, and fellow migrant, from Nigeria (Djimon Hounsou), who is dying of AIDS. In another’s hands this could be a maudlin mess, but Sheridan keeps In America on the right side of sentimentality, crafting a sharp and sincere depiction of what it’s like to be poor and a stranger in a strange land. 

There’s an argument — The Hollywood Reporter has made it — that documentarian Frederick Wiseman is America’s greatest living filmmaker. With 46 nonfiction features over 60 years of work, the 95-year-old director has come closer than anyone to capturing the complicated, glorious melting pot mess that is the United States. And never more than with this 2015 doc, a portrait of Jackson Heights, Queens, where some 160 languages are spoken and where Black, white and brown mix with Irish and Italian, Mexican and Dominican, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, male, female, gay and transgender, to create a single community. It’s a community threatened less by internal division than by the economic pressures of gentrification and corporate capture. 

Based on Amy Tan’s best-selling novel, The Joy Luck Club renders the Chinese American experience through the story of four older ladies, all of whom survived harrowing journeys from pre-revolutionary China to a comfortable life in San Francisco, who meet once a week to play mahjong and compare stories of their families and grandchildren. Effortlessly moving between past and present, from 1930s China to 1990s America, Wayne Wang manages to make a culturally specific story a universal one about how the hope and trials of one generation both inspire and restrain the next.

An aging French shoe-shiner spots a young African boy on the run, and decides to help him. From the simplest of plots, Aki Kaurismäki spins a quirky, low-key fable about immigration and solidarity. The Finnish director’s droll, deadpan humor only heightens the film’s emotional punch and its quietly urgent call for human decency in the face of Europe’s hardened borders. 

With unsparing realism, Maria Full of Grace documents the narco-corridors that shadow the migrant path. The film resists moralizing, instead portraying its titular protagonist — Catalina Sandino Moreno in an astounding, Oscar-nominated performance — as a figure of resourcefulness and resolve. Her journey, as a pregnant teen fired from her dead-end job at a Colombian flower factory who becomes a drug mule smuggling heroin over the border, crystallizes the stark choices facing those pushed to migrate under duress.

Lee Isaac Chung’s tender drama about a Korean American family trying to start a farm in 1980s Arkansas redefines the immigrant story as one of quiet perseverance and complicated dreams. With standout turns by Steven Yeun and Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung, Minari doesn’t sensationalize hardship. Instead, it finds beauty in small moments — planting crops, sharing meals, watching a child grow — and in the unwavering belief that something can take root. 

This vibrant romantic drama from Mira Nair (mother of New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani) tracks the cross-cultural love story between Demetrius (Denzel Washington), an African American carpet cleaner, and Mina (Sarita Choudhury), a Ugandan Indian immigrant, in 1990s Mississippi. They have more in common than they think. “You’re like us,” Demetrius’ younger brother tells Mina. “You’ve never been to India. We’ve never been to Africa.” A story of race, displacement and diasporic identity set alight by Washington and Choudhury’s fiery onscreen chemistry. 

Set amid Thatcher-era London, Stephen Frears’ breakthrough somehow manages to be, simultaneously, class commentary, immigrant family drama and queer romance. Omar, a young British Pakistani, reconnects with old Cockney friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis in his first substantive role), a disaffected working-class kid who is drifting toward the far right. Together they try to revitalize a failing laundromat — wonderfully named Churchill’s — owned by Omar’s uncle. Hanif Kureishi’s sharp script has as much, if not more, empathy for its white English characters — Johnny in particular — and explores the comic paradox of an immigrant group, once exploited, that rise above the poor native population and become the exploiters themselves. 

Brian De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone swapped the Italian gangster of Howard Hawks’ 1932 original for a fresh-off-the-boat Cuban criminal in this grotesque riff on immigrant ambition. In this operatic tragedy, excess replaces identity and violence becomes a badge of success. As Tony Montana says: “In America, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.” The over-the-top vulgarity is the point, exposing the cultural fantasies it mimics and offering not a glorification, but an indictment of the American dream. 

Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2007 breakout follows a Franco-Arab shipyard worker in southern France who dreams of opening a couscous restaura­nt. Blending family chaos with kitchen-table realism, The Secret of the Grain is a culinary meditation on legacy, labor and cultural survival. With its final, breathless sequence, Kechiche turns a modest meal into an immigrant epic — flavored with garlic, grit and hope.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s gritty feature debut follows a Honduran teenager and a Mexican gang member as they ride north on freight trains bound for the U.S. border. Part chase thriller, part migrant odyssey, Sin Nombre balances high-stakes tension with lyrical humanity, eschewing docudrama realism for a more poetical depiction of the hope and desperation of Central American migrants fighting for a better life.

Abou Sangaré was working as an undocumented Guinean immigrant in Paris when he was cast in Boris Lojkine’s ticking-clock drama about a bicycle courier racing to make a living and to obtain legal status — by telling his immigration officer the right “story.” Shot with a skeleton crew that allows Sangaré to blend in with the Parisian crowd of desperate migrants and indifferent locals, Lojkine viscerally captures the struggle of those who sacrifice everything, including their personal identity, in order to survive. Sangaré won best actor honors at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, the European Film Awards and the Cesars. The performance also got him the interview with immigration and permanent residence status. He now works as a heavy truck mechanic at a garage in Amiens. 

From Belgian masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne comes this lean, heartbreaking story of two African youths — one a boy, one a teenage girl — pretending to be siblings to stay together in Europe’s asylum system. With their trademark kitchen-sink realism, the Dardennes sketch a story of friendship, precarity and betrayal on a continent where childhood itself becomes conditional. Tori and Lokita is a blistering indictment of a system that demands proof of humanity.

Domee Shi’s exuberant, utterly delightful Pixar film captures the turbulence of adolescence through the lens of intergenerational conflict in an immigrant household. Mei is a bespectacled Chinese-Canadian teen who transforms into a red panda as she begins going through puberty, the metamorphosis standing in for both sexual awakening and inherited expectation, reflecting the dual pressures of cultural loyalty and personal freedom. Its vibrant animation — Shi’s influences range from Miyazaki to Chinese watercolor — and infectious humor serve as entry points for a story deeply attuned to the complexities of diasporic girlhood.

Tom McCarthy’s quietly powerful indie centers on a widowed economics professor (Richard Jenkins) who discovers two undocumented immigrants living in his New York apartment. What begins as awkward cohabitation turns into a subtle meditation on post-9/11 detention, citizenship and human connection. The Visitor sidesteps sentimentality for nuance, anchored by Jenkins’ deeply felt, Oscar-nominated performance.

The quintessential immigrant musical, West Side Story reframes Romeo and Juliet as a turf war between white working-class New Yorkers and Puerto Rican newcomers. With songs by Bernstein and Sondheim and Jerome Robbins’ iconic choreography, the film grapples with racism, assimilation and the bitter promise of the American dream. Whether in Robert Wise’s 1961 original or Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake, the story still cuts deep.