Jeanine Meerapfel, cosmopolitan auteur of the immigrant condition

Jeanine Meerapfel has directed over a dozen feature-length films - mostly in Germany and Argentina - making her arguably the most prolific Argentine woman director ever. While scholars have tended to examine her films individually or grouped by nation of production, Matt Losada's chapter considers instead the transnational dimension of her work as what Mette Hjort calls cosmopolitan transnationalism, which "emerges as the ... effect of a lived experience of the limits of national belonging and citizenship. " With Meerapfel's privileged access to various communities - Jewish, immigrant, Argentine, German - her auteurship is based on multiple belongings and crossed trajectories of immigration, exploring issues faced by minority women under xenophobic authoritarianism and the resulting displacement and immigrant condition. Losada argues that her work is particularly relevant in a present in which the figure of the immigrant is central to the widespread political weaponisation of xenophobia.