Nanna Heidenreich sets the history-making power of film and the art of migration against the apparent ahistoricity with which migration in Germany is addressed. She illustrates how the juridical category of »foreigner« is indeed as stubborn as it is socially misunderstood, yet how the cinema enacts not just the recognition (and failed recognition) services of this German immigration discourse - it portrays other negotiations of history and stories, genealogies and gender, iconoclastic controversies, transparency and veil, secularization, blood, sex, and skin.