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The image of a dead migrant prone on a beach is a tragic yet commonplace icon of the early twenty-first century, symbolizing the catastrophic synergy amongst seascapes, migration and death in the contemporary cultural imaginary. While the images of three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi that circulated in the summer of 2015 have recently reflected the potency of the image with regard to the (in) visibility of migrants and migration in contemporary society and culture, Spanish cinema has been engaging with this issue since the turn of the century. In this article I explore tensions between absence and presence with regard to interactions between seascapes and migration in five post-2000 Spanish films: En construcción (Guerín, 2001), Ilegal (Vilar, 2003), Retorno a Hansala (Gutiérrez, 2008), Amador (León de Aranoa, 2010) and Biutiful (Iñárritu, 2010). My contention is that these films foreground ethically motivated strategies of representation that seek to respectfully render migrants visible, or relatedly to draw attention to their invisibility.
