This thesis employs a narrative analysis of more than twenty-five films that are centrally concerned with immigrants and the immigrant experience. In Part One, drawing from the work of Yosefa Loshitzky, I will focus on films that feature an immigrant lead character. In Part Two, I will explore movies that filter immigration through the perspective of a native-born citizen protagonist. Important to my reading throughout this study is how we, as viewers, are situated by these stories to feel or react to the predicament of the immigrant. By examining two narrative approaches, that of the immigrant protagonist and the citizen protagonist, we can better understand how films engage larger issues of identity, belonging, and citizenship. The thesis will conclude with a close reading of Goodbye Solo. This film uniquely transcends convenient categories of immigrant narrative or Eurocentric perspective; instead it approximates Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's call for a polycentric approach to narrative in their foundational work, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. / Graduation date: 2013

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