This article discusses four recently released refugee films: Dolce Fine Giornata, Atlantics, Island of the Hungry Ghosts, and Life Overtakes Me. It draws on a range of theoretical frames, including the work of Avery Gordon and Jacques Derrida on spectrality, in order to outline the original concept of ‘fugitive aesthetics’, the narrative and stylistic system that, we argue, underpins a wide spectrum of refugee films. While the majority of films about refugeeism typically place refugees centre-stage, our article focuses on the phenomenology of the effacement of this figure. In analysing these films in which refugees are at the margins of the narrative, we examine the ways that unresolved histories of migration, colonisation and enclosure irrupt traumatically into the present. Thus, this article draws out complexities of this field of highly politicised representation that are all too often overlooked in debates around the mediation and documentation of refugee experience.