Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

It’s been 24 years since the first film in the Harry Potter series premiered, and the fandom has been through ups, downs, and many controversies. Having an impulse to rewatch this series, I think it would be interesting to scrutinize its representation of diversity, especially in its 4th film, where the international magical events emerged. 

At first, Harry Potter and his friends attended the Quidditch World Cup. After they were teleported, the background was the picturesque landscape of the Seven Sisters cliffs in England, exactly in the quintessential angle that would appear in postcards. When they walked through the campsite, numerous flags could be sighted, and most of them were the same as the national flags in our Muggle world: the flags of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, the United States 🇺🇸, Italy 🇮🇹, India 🇮🇳, Uganda 🇺🇬, Bulgaria 🇧🇬, Australia 🇦🇺/New Zealand 🇳🇿, and Argentina 🇦🇷/Nicaragua 🇳🇮. There are plenty of flags in black and red stripes and sometimes with a pattern in the middle, which I fail to identify. After the arena was shown the first time on the screen, it’s shown that a group of Black men dressed in ornamented traditional capes and hairpieces are entering the arena. It attempts to emphasize the ‘world’ in the Quidditch World Cup and provoke viewers’ imagination by showing various flags across continents and the Black audience.