There’s a moment near the (not particularly happy) ending of Michael Haneke’s new film, Happy End, where a group of African refugees turns up uninvited at a posh, exclusively white restaurant in Calais, to the surprise and embarrassment of all concerned. It’s the type of predicament Haneke enjoys: the bubble of European bourgeois smugness punctured by a sobering dose of reality. For cinema audiences in affluent parts of the world, it is an equally discomfiting experience. Aren’t we just like those restaurant diners, trying to enjoy our leisure time and forget about what’s going on outside? Happy End isn’t specifically about Europe’s migrant crisis, but as Haneke put it in a recent interview: “Calais has become a catchword for all our ignorance about what is happening in the world… We focus so much on our own navels, what’s going on all around us is only of peripheral interest.”

For European cinema in particular, this is a challenge: how to faithfully represent the migrant situation to people who don’t necessarily want to hear about it? The influx of refugees and migrants to the continent over the past five years is surely the biggest upheaval Europe has experienced since the second world war. It has altered the landscape in every way – politically, socially, demographically, even physically, when one thinks of the new borders and fences and refugee camps, such as Calais’ notorious “Jungle”. Europe’s film-makers have begun to respond, to the extent that a nod to the migrant crisis is almost becoming obligatory at the awards-friendly end of the business. On the face of it, the personal stories of immigrants and refugees are often highly dramatic and therefore ought to make great cinema, but new modes of cinema may be required.

Happy End. Photograph: Allstar/ARTIFICIAL EYE

In Haneke’s case, Happy End largely remains within the director’s white, bourgeois comfort zone, though that’s often tainted by racial guilt (looking back to his 2005 film Hidden, especially). That’s a bit of a cake-and-eat-it, for both Haneke – who satirises our indifference to justify his own – and for us, his audience, who can convince ourselves that we’re “engaging” with the migrant crisis when we’re really just watching a movie about it.

Other film-makers have also been guilty of this, such as Luca Guadagnino, whose A Bigger Splash also interrupted the party of its moneyed, white hedonists with a few intrusions of migrants, who are clearly having a very different time of it on the Sicilian coast. It’s telling that A Bigger Splash was a remake of a 1969 French film. Apart from the migrant scenes, the basic template of the original wasn’t changed. Guadagnino dodged the issue entirely with his recent followup, Call Me By Your Name – which is set in the 1980s. The film’s depiction of a summery, wealthy European idyll is beguiling, but it’s an illusion that has become harder to maintain in the present day.

The latter point has been hammered home by recent documentaries. Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea is also set in Sicily, on the island of Lampedusa, many of whose natives have become accustomed to boatloads of migrants arriving on their shores. The final portion of the film is particularly shocking, with the film-maker boarding a boat full of traumatised, sick, dehydrated survivors, and many dead bodies. Up in the hills, meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes might be dancing around the pool in A Bigger Splash. Fire At Sea was praised for its empathic, non-judgmental observation, and won the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlin film festival. Its humane focus was almost exclusively trained on the islanders, however. By contrast, the migrants are practically a faceless, nameless mass.

The same is even more true of Ai Weiwei’s new documentary, Human Flow, which chronicles our era of unprecedented human migration, visiting 23 countries around the world. Weiwei gets his hands dirty; we often see him filming the unfolding misery on his mobile phone. He can do little more than bear witness, and perhaps that’s enough. His global celebrity as an artist will hopefully attract attention to the subject. “I don’t see myself as any different from them,” he says. “We may speak totally different languages and have totally different belief systems but I understand them. Like me, they are also afraid of the cold and don’t like standing in the rain or being hungry. Like me, they need a sense of security.”

A recurring theme of Human Flow is how displaced peoples are deprived not only of their homes, security and possessions, but also of their identity as individuals. In conveying the scale of the problem, Human Flow often has no choice but to exacerbate that. The film’s most memorable images are often taken from the air or from elevated camera angles, uncomfortably reminiscent of wildlife programmes such as Blue Planet: a boatload of migrants dwarfed by the open sea; a vast Jordanian refugee “city” where people are reduced to ants; lines of people crossing rivers in rural Greece like a migrating herd, on their march to what will be a closed border. There are also harrowing individual testimonies – “Where am I supposed to start my life?” pleads a sick, weeping mother who has walked for 60 days with her son. The film challenges us to multiply one by the other. The maths is impossible.

God’s Own Country. Photograph: Picturehouse Entertainment

There’s an absence of a human element from most portrayals of migrants, argues Lily Parrott, co-founder of the London Migration film festival. “Representations of migration groups is very binary: in extreme terms, usually as enemies or as victims. And we view these overly simplistic portrayals of peoples to be equally dehumanising in different ways. To reduce people to very simplistic categories is to take away the very things that make them human. We want to problematise and complicate this idea of migrations as something that happens separately from the human experience. Migration is the human experience.”The festival, now in its second year, is one of a growing number of cultural events seeking to discuss, debate and give voice to different perspectives on the migration (the annual Refugee Week is another). The majority of migration is not from the global north to the global south, they point out, and 80% of migrants move to a neighbouring country.

In terms of what cinema can do, there’s often value in conveying the point of view of the migrants themselves, rather than those affected by it. It wasn’t that long ago that British cinema had a knack for this, when one thinks back to acclaimed films such as 2000’s Last Resort (concerning a Russian, asylum-seeking single mother in Margate), or Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 docudrama In This World (following two Afghan refugees from Pakistan to London), or Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, which cleverly packaged the London immigrant experience into an “underworld” thriller. That tradition looks to be returning, judging by two very different recent hits: God’s Own Country and Paddington.God’s Own Country wasn’t overtly about capturing the immigrant experience, which is perhaps why it did it so well. The sensual, image-led story is tightly focused on the growing passion between a closeted farmer’s son and the Romanian hired hand, and barely touches on national politics, being set in a remote farmstead in the scenic Yorkshire Dales (its maker, Francis Lee, wrote the story before the Brexit referendum). Just a few xenophobic encounters left the overall impression that it’s easier to be gay in modern-day Britain than to be an eastern European immigrant.

Paddington and its sequel are a very different beast, but in their abstracted way, they successfully sweeten the pill of the immigrant experience to suit family palettes. To do that without diluting the principles of tolerance, empathy and civility is no small achievement. Fashioning migrant and refugee stories – which often entail suffering and misery – into mainstream entertainment is a difficult circle to square, but given the culture-clash potential, it’s not impossible. The biggest German-language hit of last year was Wilkommen Bei Den Hartmanns, or Welcome To Germany. This broad farce followed a Nigerian refugee’s entry into a wealthy, white Munich family, with an even-handed cast of characters ranging from liberal do-gooders to xenophobic conservatives, Pegida-style nationalists to Islamist sympathisers. The movie was well-timed, coming just after Angela Merkel’s decision to admit some 1 million refugees into Germany, though its intentions were somewhat undermined by the omission of the Nigerian actor’s name (Eric Kabongo) from the poster.

The Other Side of Hope. Photograph: Curzon Artificial Eye

If there’s one film-maker who has proved to be equipped to handle the migrant crisis on film, it is Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, whose last two films have dealt squarely with European refugees, and, crucially given them their humanity. This is all the more surprising given Kaurismaki’s favoured mode of stylised deadpan comedy. His films are full of artful artificiality, dry absurdity and retro fashions – particularly from the 1950s. But the European heritage Kaurismaki evokes is not the nationalist fantasy of “whites only” and closed borders, but one of postwar optimism and civility and openness to outside influences. His 2011 film Le Havre evokes the humanist France of Jean Renoir or François Truffaut in its tale of townsfolk conspiring to hide an African boy from the authorities – he could be a Jewish kid in a second world war film.

This year’s followup, The Other Side of Hope, was set in Finland but it feels like the same Kaurismaki country. The story involves a Syrian refugee this time, Khaled, who arrives in the country by accident and immediately checks in with the authorities, who listen sympathetically to his harrowing tale of persecution. But then Khaled is adopted and employed by a retired shirt salesman attempting to open a sushi restaurant. Neither of them know the first thing about sushi, but that’s OK. If the African migrants from Happy End walked into The Other Side of Hope’s sushi restaurant, you feel they would be offered a table straight away, or a job. Kaurismaki’s films are possibly closer to Paddington than Ai Weiwei’s documentary in terms of hard-hitting realism, but where other modes of cinema have failed, his eccentric, personal style is somehow robust enough to address the issues of the age, satisfy entertainment demands, and respect both its subjects and its audience. We all come out of it feeling more human. Perhaps that’s the best cinema can hope to achieve.