Comedy · Drama
American
2004 · Directed by Steven Spielberg · 128 min
A traveller from a small Eastern European country lands at New York's JFK airport and discovers that, because of events at home, he is allowed neither to enter the United States nor to fly back. A gentle, sentimental comedy about waiting, rules and the small society that forms inside a transit space.
Why it matters in cinema history
A characteristic Spielberg-Hanks collaboration and one of Hollywood's few mainstream comedies of the early 2000s to treat borders, statelessness and bureaucracy as its central situation.
Watch with intention
Watch the terminal as a character and a small town, and watch how Hanks builds comedy out of a man learning to read it.
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