ABSTRACT Cultural and linguistic border-crossings are at the heart of transnational filmmaking practice, and language barriers pose unique challenges and opportunities to these crossings. Media production in a language one does not speak or understand may raise questions of authenticity, exploitation, and misrepresentation, while also allowing filmmakers to reach wider audiences and prompting reflection on the instability of national borders in production contexts. The articles in this special issue include case studies and broader examinations of multilingual and translingual trends in contemporary screen media production. The screen texts studied include documentary, narrative feature films, and streaming series made using American and French Sign Languages (ASL, LSF), Danish, English, French, Greek, Japanese, Kurdish, Navajo, Polish, Sámi, and Swedish. While these screen texts developed in response to different incentives and their productions involved diverse practical and ethical considerations, they share fundamental similarities in the language barriers encountered during production and acts of translation, multilingualism, and creative collaboration involved in overcoming these barriers. Informed by insights from Deaf Criticism, biopolitics, cultural studies, and transnational film theory, these articles intervene in cultural studies discussions of nation, language, and identity and the evolving discourse around representation and authenticity in screen media.

ABSTRACT This article argues for the critical importance of properly organising archival film collections as both a prerequisite for, and an extension of critical historiography of practises such as historical colonialism. This argument will be mounted by means of an extensive case study of the work undertaken in Spain’s state film archive, the Filmoteca Española, to catalogue vast swathes of materials relating to the country’s colonial and imperial history. The paper begins by offering a characterisation of the most important film collections and describing the origin and intake to the archive of the most significant works based on the documentary records. It then places the production and exhibition of the corpus in their historical contexts, identifying distinct historical periods based on an analysis of the photochemical materials and newspaper archives. As such, the article illuminates the procedures used in the Filmoteca Española for the cataloguing, organisation, selection, preparation, and digitisation of these transnational materials, with the main objective being to demonstrate the significance of the technical work that takes place in the archive so that its holdings can be studied – and in this case, decolonised – with rigor in the future.

ABSTRACT Since the inception of cinema, many films have been produced in one context but intended for consumption in another – colonial films for metropolitan audiences being a prime example. Cultures that both produce and consume moving images have generally received more attention than those that, tough represented on screen, neither produce nor access these images. The rural and peripheral southern region of Angola, with its long colonial history and independence from Portuguese rule in 1975, exemplifies this latter case. Drawing on both offline and online archival research, this article explores the cinematic landscape of southern Angola, focusing on the challenges and implications of curating a century-spanning film program of varied styles for a rural audience with limited access to cinema. It examines the region’s cinematic history across shifting political contexts, technological changes, and disparaties in film consumption while addressing the contingent accessibility of these films. Adopting the perspective of a film programmer preparing to offer rural cinema screenings in a region marked by sparse production and restricted access, the article reflects on dilemmas of content selection and cinematic engagement. In doing so, it traces the longue durée of Angola’s history, highlighting the interplay between historical change and the fragmented, non-linear contexts of film production, circulation, and preservation.

ABSTRACT In May 2017, Denmark and China signed a film co-production agreement, marking Denmark as the first and only Nordic country to establish such a treaty with China. Taking two recent China-Denmark film co-productions as examples, Bille August’s The Chinese Widow (2017) and Lin Jianjie’s Brief History of a Family (2024), this paper investigates why China chose to sign a film agreement with Denmark and vice versa. It also examines the cultural and film policies that catalysed the emergence and development of this new co-production partnership. This paper aims to address two emergent trends in transnational screen studies: conceptual engagement with soft power and transnational talent development. It discusses how cinema serves as an instrument for states, institutions, and corporations to mediate diplomatic and political goals, generate soft power, and engage in nation branding. This paper argues that the transformation in geopolitical relationships between these two countries and their respective film and cultural policies over the past decade has led to this new collaborative partnership. Furthermore, it suggests that the latest European cultural policies supporting Sino-European co-production and transnational talent development have facilitated Sino-Danish film co-production.

ABSTRACT The marginalization of the Orient in U.S. cinema has reduced the Oriental space and its inhabitants to a series of clichés and stereotypes. Based on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), several film scholars like Jack Shaheen, Ella Shohat, and Lina Khatib, among others, have demonstrated that the exclusion and the distortion of the Orient in U.S. cinema were achieved through the manipulation of Oriental music, culture, religion, and the objectification of the female figure. These cinematic representations contribute to the marginalization of the Orient while creating a Eurocentric narrative. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (2013) and Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee in their De-Westernizing Film Studies (2012) challenge this long-lasting tradition that marginalizes the Other. The Hulu TV series Ramy (2019-) by the Egyptian comedian, actor, and director Ramy Youssef attempts to de-westernize the gaze on the marginalized Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the U.S. This article highlights how the series goes beyond the stereotypical iconography used to approach the Middle East while depicting the life of a first-generation American Muslim. It will use a comparative method and discourse analysis to examine how the show can deconstruct these clichés and offer a fresh perspective.

ABSTRACT Costa Rica is a Latin American country with historical close ties to the United States. This relationship is palpable in the prominence and relevance that content produced in the US has in local media diets. In this article, I analyse how young people in Costa Rica make sense of engaging with transnational media. My goal is to understand the modes in which audiences understand their consumption of foreign media, and how these media operate as a bridge to comprehend broader geopolitical dynamics. For this, I use the theory of cultural proximity to explore the forces that mobilise the reception practices of young audiences and to discern which elements they experience as culturally close. Drawing from a media consumption habits survey, 13 focus group discussions and 35 paired-interviews, I examine the ways in which political and aesthetic evaluations underpin the interpretation of transnational media. Moreover, I show that Costa Rican young audiences adopt a stance of critical resignation: an interpretative operation which entails the acceptance of a geopolitical situation of a perceived submission and inferiority, but a critical awareness of their attitudes towards and acceptance of media texts that come from abroad.