Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 48.2 September 2022: 97-116 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202209_48(2).0006 Suffering at a Distance: Fatih Akin’s Iconoclastic Cinema and the Limits of Compassion Jonas Teupert Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Taiwan University, Taiwan Abstract This paper questions the capacity of refugee images to evoke compassion and incite political action. I argue that the Christian image economy perseveres in the Western mediascape and that the religious icon displaces the depicted suffering into a spiritual realm, thus blocking an active engagement with distant events. The argument builds on a close analysis of Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014), a filmic depiction of the 1915 Armenian genocide and the ensuing odyssey of an Armenian man in search of his daughters. In a self-reflexive manner, The Cut illuminates audience responses to suffering as it is displayed in the visual media of cinema, the icon, and photography. I emphasize a photograph’s ability to convey the mourning of another exactly through what remains oblique to a general audience. The paper suggests that mourning, rather than compassion, provides an effective model for ethical responses to contemporary crises of mass displacement. Keywords refugee representation, visual media, global cinema, photography, iconoclasm, spectatorship