In his seminal essay, ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’, Jerzy Grotowski advocates a new form of theatre that will strip itself to the bone in order to reveal the quintessential nature of the art form. Borrowing this notion for the medium of cinema, this article proposes that the production practice of the Burmese-Taiwanese director Midi Z operates on a similar principle of a skeletal scale that demands a rethink about the nature of cinema. Midi Z’s homecoming trilogy, which comprises his first three feature-length films, was shot on a shoestring budget involving minimal cast and crew. This article seeks to advance, in the spirit of Grotowski’s conception, poverty as a paradoxically positive premise for a mode of filmmaking that will be termed ‘poor cinema’. It draws on Midi Z’s filmmaking career to illustrate two dimensions of poor cinema: the ubiquity of trafficking as a condition of production, and poverty as a problematic in the diegeses of the films. It argues that Midi Z’s poor cinema sets out to circumvent censorship through trafficking and, in this invariably transnational modus operandi, also to stage poverty as a problematic that interrogates the ethics and aesthetics of filmmaking.

This essay proposes a new visual politics of Europe’s borders that foregrounds encounters and trespassings. It focuses on the analysis of several films that deal with the migrant drama but in particular on two films that have received wide international acclaim: Io Sto con la Sposa [On The Bride’s Side] (2014) and Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea] (2016). The films deal with migration as a humanitarian crisis but are not simple acts of denunciation. They are also not straightforward documentaries but offer innovative visual registers that defy categorization into fixed genres, such as the road movie or observational documentary. On the Bride’s Side uses the format of a travelling wedding party that disregards both legislation restricting free mobility in Europe and the cynicism about the hopelessness of the migrant condition. The film was realized through an online crowdfunding campaign unprecedented in Italy. Fire at Sea presents the tragedy of Lampedusa outside of the regular schemes and screens, combining the migrant drama with the ordinary lives of people on the island, mostly through the perspective of a 12-year-old boy, Samuele, whose lazy eye becomes a metaphor for the short-sightedness of Europe. Both films propose a new aesthetic of the border, forging new imaginaries for Europe where spaces of solidarity and cosmopolitanism are still possible.

In scholarly literature, new wave cinemas have been discussed mainly within their respective national or regional frameworks. Even when multiple new waves are brought under scrutiny, the focus is o...

It is only in the last few decades that products from Arab cinema have achieved more of a crossover or breakthrough kind of success, at least in art house terms, with films such as Annemarie Jacir’...

The Three Amigos aims to provide an in-depth exploration of the filmmaking of three internationally recognized Mexican directors, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Alfonso Cuaron,...

ABSTRACT1997 marked an especially bleak year for the film industry in Mexico, with only nine feature films produced. Just a decade and a half later, the industry shows signs of rejuvenation on both the domestic and international fronts; the Mexican Cinematographic Institute reports 112 films produced or co-produced with Mexico in 2012. While not ignoring the complexities of the greater story of the Mexican film-making, this article focuses on an area of industry development that often goes unnoticed and is difficult to quantifiably analyse, behind the scenes at film festivals. Originally founded in 1998 as ‘Festival Internacional de Cine “Expresión en Corto”’ (EEC), in 2011 the festival took the name Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF). Over the past decade, EEC/GIFF has established an Industry area, along with programmes that mentor new generations of film-makers in national and transnational contexts. Arguably, such commitment is an essential factor undergirding the long-term viability and vitality of Mexican Cinema on the world stage.

ABSTRACT‘I fix things, stuff like that’. With these words Walt Kowalsky (Clint Eastwood) describes himself in Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008). Eastwood's role as fixer is not new to his star persona (‘fixing things’ was after all what his roles in Sergio Leone's trilogy and the Dirty Harry franchise were about). What is new in Gran Torino is the nature of the problem to be fixed, since it involves the reconsideration of the character's own national and cultural identity through his—at the beginning openly reluctant—engagement with the urban borders within his Detroit neighbourhood. The filmic geography of Walt's neighbourhood is of great importance in the construction of Gran Torino, particularly in its employment of a ‘border dynamic’ in the middle of a quintessentially US space. In this article I explore the articulation of the process of disintegration of borders, traced by the film through an analysis of its spatial dynamics, and the impact of the presence of border crossers and transnational citizens on the construction of national identity.

ABSTRACTThis article critically engages with the politics of the gaze and the melodramatic mode in Nessa no chikai/Vow in the Desert (Watanabe, 1940). Staged in the Chinese mainland during the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945), this adventure-melodrama film features ‘border-crossing’ multilingual actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko (aka Li Xianglan or Ri Kōran) and the Japanese male star Hasegawa Kazuo. Japan's cultural adaptation to western hegemony through technology, i.e. ‘modernization’, was a hybrid process and interconnected with similar endeavours by their counterparts in the Chinese mainland. I argue that the film was a site for Japanese film-makers to assert their entitlement to modern technology in general, and the cinematic gaze in particular. While architectural metaphors and actors‘bodies anchor the phantasm of modernized national self, the gaze at the actress's body is orchestrated so as to blur national identities and mediate film spectators’ longing for whiteness and the West.