ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at cultural juxtapositions in relation to journeys of significant distance. However, in many parts of the UK, especially in the multicultural metropolises, there are of course countless 'foreign' cultures all around all the time, which makes everyone both an insider and an outsider. A new arrival in a culture offers film-makers a point of departure into that culture, and a pretext to take a tour of the parts of it that they feel to be of note. The main protagonists, acting as surrogates for cinema-goers, enter a new and usually very different world. Unlike Crisis, Windom's Way and The Last King of Scotland, which deal with high-profile events involving presidents and large-scale upheaval, Dirty Pretty Things involves people who are small to the point of near-invisibility, and it looks from the bottom up at a mainstream world with which are all familiar – or rather, half-familiar.
