Through the visual representations they transmit and mediate, films are one of the most accessible sites where the dynamics of cross-cultural image-making can be unravelled. Visual images carry ‘mental’ schemata that underpin the interplay between perception of the other and self-perception, constructing or deconstructing the ‘maps’ of meaning through which a particular group of people makes sense of everyday practices and experience. Starting from these theoretical premises rooted in imagology, the paper intends to analyse the form and function of recent representations of migration and the migrant’s experience as they are mediated by contemporary Romanian, French and Italian filmic texts. While all these texts attempt to imaginatively figure an actual cultural terrain where the migrant challenges or fluidises embedded hierarchies established between self and other, native and foreign, home and deterritorialisation, centre and periphery, West and East, their different perspectival contexts provide ambiguous and often conflicting articulations for the above-mentioned binaries.