ABSTRACT This article provides the first scholarly analysis of Kazım Öz’s Fotograf (2001), Bahoz (2008), and Zer (2017) as a cohesive trilogy, titled here East of the Euphrates. It argues that the trilogy functions as a subversive counter-history through the road movie form, challenging Turkish state-sponsored nationalism and militarism by constructing a symbolic geography where the Euphrates River and the eastward journey become metaphors for Kurdish identity, resistance, and collective memory. However, the article also advances a dialectical critique: while Öz’s project is politically courageous and cinematically innovative, it simultaneously reproduces essentialist binaries, didactic frameworks, and a romanticised politics that constrain its emancipatory potential. Through close textual analysis, genre study, and ideological critique, the article examines the trilogy’s treatment of anti-colonial discourse, its systematic semiotics of state violence, and its alignment with European road cinema conventions. It concludes that the trilogy’s power lies in its unflinching confrontation with erasure and assimilation, yet its rigid moral cartography and underdeveloped character interiority ultimately substitute doctrinal certainty for the open-ended exploration that the road genre promises. In doing so, the article situates Öz’s work as a radical yet contested cinematic intervention within Kurdish political filmmaking and transnational cinema studies.

ABSTRACT Much of the existing body of work on cultural exchange in cinema focuses on feature films as manifestations of cinematic transnationalisms, and less on short films. Starting from two Clermont-Ferrand competition titles, Tonia Mishiali’s Daphne (2022) and Savvas Stavrou’s Buffer Zone (2023), we look at how specific examples of directors and their short films reflect recent observations that Greek Cypriot cinema is entering a phase in which filmmakers actively seek international collaborations and opportunities to further their art-making. The article focuses on the short films of Mishiali, Stavrou, Myrsini Aristidou and Alexandra Matheou, providing an overview of the work of each filmmaker leading to a close analysis of their short(s). The aim of our analysis is to identify the films’ transnational qualities, as well as how these may echo current practices in European filmmaking. We argue that even though these shorts form part of the transnational orientation of Greek Cypriot cinema, they simultaneously contribute to the development of a diverse local cinema that radically departs from dominant on-screen representations of Cyprus, or revisit them by way of social critique.

ABSTRACT David Bruckner’s The Ritual (2017) has been so far absent from discussion of Brexit cinema. And yet the horror film, the story of a group of Englishmen who become fatally lost in the Swedish wilderness after the death of their Irish friend, contains numerous links to the 2016 referendum, with connections ranging from direct references to motifs of matrimony and the fear of middle-age. In Bruckner’s film, marriage becomes a metaphor for an unhappy union with Europe, which for many Brexiteers meant a loss of UK autonomy, while the lament of ageing echoes the perceived decline, perpetuated by the Vote Leave camp, of a once great nation. In The Ritual, nostalgia for greatness becomes a need for the autonomy of youth, with protagonist Luke craving the powerful freedom he believes his friends have too easily relinquished. In his search for an ideal identity in the past, Luke also resembles the ‘Left Behind,’ a marginalised and pessimistic group in British society considered integral to Vote Leave’s success. In their nostalgic yearning for times of rigid borders and fixed identity, both the Left Behind and Luke look to the illusory past to overcome an increasing sense of irrelevance in the present.

ABSTRACT This article examines how summer resorts (sayfiyeler) are represented in Turkish cinema from the 1960s to 1990s, focusing on Yeşilçam films. It argues that these spaces are not passive settings but active narrative and symbolic environments reflect broader socio-cultural dynamics such as spatial segregation, seasonal mobility, family structures, and class-based leisure. Yeşilçam offers fertile ground for exploring how summer resorts (sayfiyeler) function as both physical and ideological constructs in visual culture. The study analyzes Sevmek Zamanı (1966), Sevgili Babam (1969), Arkadaş (1974), Metres (1983), and Ada (1988) which are selected for their narrative focus on summer life, spatial shifts between city and leisure zones, and architectural settings. The timeframe coincides with Yeşilçam’s golden era, when urbanization, mobility, and modernity became central themes. The article asks: How do Yeşilçam films construct the visual and spatial imagination of summer resorts in relation to class, leisure, and urban escape? The article utilizes visual cultural analysis and cinematic semiotics, concentrating on mise-en-scène, spatial framing, and narrative function. The study underscores film’s role in documenting spatial practices and cultural perceptions tied to Turkey’s summer culture. Ultimately, the study aims to show how sayfiye spaces function as condensed visual codes of modernity, aspiration, and socio-spatial boundaries.

ABSTRACT Although highly rated by cinephiles but much less recognized than other directors who debuted in France in the late 1950s, Marcel Hanoun is remembered as a model auteur who never conformed to industrial canons. This paper seeks to analyze the most important of the works he shot in Spain, Octobre à Madrid, with the aim of understanding how this film essay relates to imaginaries about that country. The modernity of the cinematographic proposal coexists with an exotic vision of the Spanish, a combination that bears an interesting resemblance to the dynamics of modern tourism. In order to carry out this analysis, the film is contextualized with Hanoun’s poetics, his idea of authorship, and the critical reading of the film.

ABSTRACT The relationship between place and identity has had a very specific significance in the development of Scottish cinema. Until the 1980s Scotland tended to be depicted as an essentially rural and remote, a fantasy space characterised within the interlinked representational discourses of tartanry and kailyard by romantic and picturesque highland and island locations or parochial and backward villages and small towns. With the emergence of a New Scottish cinema in the 1990s, this was subsequently replaced by a focus on more realist narratives located in the urban centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In this essay, I will explore the work of Scott Graham, whose three features to date - Shell, Iona and Run – have provided a renewed engagement with a contemporary Scotland that (re)incorporates both the highland and island landscapes that provided the backdrop to the romantic tradition of tartanry, and the small-town setting familiar from the kailyard tradition. These settings are central to the identity and predicament of Graham’s protagonists, who are struggling with a sense of isolation, loneliness or lack of connection, alienated from place, community and even family. Consequently, Graham provides evidence for the continuing relevance of a distinctive Scottish cinematic tradition.

ABSTRACT Using the work of Pamela Robertson Wojcik, this article positions the Dardennes treamtment of the child as an example of ‘slow death cinema’ (Robertson Wojcik, 2021) an exntesion of Laurent Berlant’s conception of the ‘slow death’ (2007). In these films children are not orientated towards a hopeful and socially mobile conception of adulthood but rather left to explore the micro-borders of Searaing, moving through and engaging with this depressed geography without ever transcending, leaving or developing beyond it. These children are representative of a ‘perpetual motion in place’ (Robertson Wojcik, 2021), in that they move constantly - on bikes, trains, busses, cars and motorbikes - but never leave. Whilst there may be some moments of moral or interpersonal development, children within the films of the Dardennes are an expression of an ultimaltely ambigious rather than a hopeful future. This article argues that this physichal precarity and immobility is tied to questions of class and inequality and is expressed as an aspect of the Dardennes aestehtic approach. It suggests that whilst, the Dardennes largely avoid explicit investigations of the stystems that underpin social-inequality they explore these themes most productively in their use of the ‘immobile’ child.