This article considers the work of Arnaud des Pallières, a contemporary French filmmaker who, as I show through a close-reading of his film Adieu (2004), demonstrates a singular and rigorous approach to the auditory to think about migration in the afterlife of colonial intervention. I am particularly interested in des Pallières’ status as a non-refugee filmmaker reflecting on the experience of displacement, and the ways in which he uses his filmic and sonic practice to pay attention to and capture the experience of migration beyond the visual. I argue this turn to the auditory also is a means of acknowledging his own distance from the subject of migration and refugee experience.