This essay explores the appropriation and creative interpretation of audiovisual archives in cinematic representations of the Iraq war and the Israel/Palestine conflict. It showcases the political possibilities of imperial archives in Testimonies from Fallujah (Hamodi Jasim, 2004) and A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari, 2024), two medium-length compilation films that repurpose American and Israeli hegemonic media and fictional footage. Despite their historical, geopolitical, and production differences, the two films share a similar engagement with and against the imperial film and media archive. This essay examines the two films’ archival practices. It argues that the reuse of imperial materials in Testimonies from Fallujah and A Fidai effectively disputes underlying imperial discourses and structures of power in the mediation and filmic representation of the Iraq war and the conflict in Palestine.

"This article reflects on a creative research project which utilises audiovisual technologies to foster conversations with feminist activists in four historically related cities— Havana (Cuba) which is twinned with Glasgow (Scotland), and Matanzas (Cuba) which is twinned with Vilanova i la Geltrú (Catalunya). Under the banner “Ragged Cinema”, we are undertaking a project which brings together feminists across the four cities to explore how no-budget, collaborative filmmaking might be utilised to encourage experience sharing between activists in the Global South and the Global North, and develop translocal networks of support and solidarity. By developing a crosscultural project rooted in specific patriarchal states, capitalist and communist, we aim to amplify the often-unheard voices of nonstate actors. In December 2023, a step towards this occurred when work-in-process films made by the activists were presented at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana (International Festival

Latin America has long been a region marked by the arrival of foreign actors. Especially since the landing of Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the whole continent has been in a constant process of redefining itself in assimilation or rejection of external influences while holding tight to what remains autochthonous. Cinema has not been an exception in this process of exchange. The arrival of the Lumière brothers—“another foreign import” from Europe (López 48)—is intimately connected to this history of external influences that have recursively shaped Latin American visual culture over many centuries.

Memoria (2021) is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first film made outside his native Thailand. The director’s geographical origin, the Colombian setting, and the extensive international funding make the film a singular transnational production. The global and local elements embedded in both the narrative and the production history open a space for critical examination of the geopolitical interconnections between the Global North and South, and between two diverse Global South countries—Thailand and Colombia. Considering the film as a crossroads of different discourses, I analyse its innovative approach to the Colombian context, seeing it as the result of a journey of several months made by the director through the country, a dynamism later echoed both by the mobility of the main character and by the singular model of exhibition chosen for the film. I propose that the perspective of a foreign auteur from a different Global South context offers a novel view on Colombian collective memory of historical violence. I f

This article provides an intermedial history and analysis of Dieter Schidor’s 1985 film Kalt in Kolumbien to trace a small but fascinating history of interaction between German and Colombian film cultures. Examining archival documents, interviews, and the fictionalised accounts of the film’s production in Gary Indiana’s Gone Tomorrow, the article revisits the “golden age” of the Cartagena International Film Festival, Schidor’s trip, and the film’s production process. The essay argues that Schidor brings the icy austerity, queer desires, and cruel humour of the German New Wave to the Colombian city to create a film that is comically brutal towards locals and foreigners alike, as it attempts to highlight the inequalities that allowed its director to eat, drink, and do drugs “like a king” in Cartagena. The essay suggests that Kalt in Kolumbien is a document of the complicated union between Germany and America as a cultural and intellectual centres and Latin America as a peripheral, romanticised source of inspiration.

In December of 2018, the short film Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898), featuring the first known on-screen kiss between two Black actors (Saint Shuttle and Gertie Brown), directed by Black film director and Selig Polyscope Company owner William Selig, was recovered, restored, and added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Before its discovery, Something Good’s legacy remained threatened by what Claudy Op Den Kamp thus encapsulates in their book The Greatest Films Never Seen: “if [films] cannot be seen, it will become increasingly hard to remember them” (12). Two years after Something Good’s restoration and exhibition, the Library of Congress scholar-in-residence Maya Cade launched the revolutionary Black Film Archive, a living register of national and international Black films made from 1915 to 1979 (now 1898 to 1989) that exhibit and celebrate “the rich, abundant history of Black cinema”. The site itself promises in its mission statement to uplift and make known “historically and culturally significant films [...] about Black people accessible through a streaming guide with cultural context”. This paper examines the placement and impact of Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive within the larger discourse of film history and film historiography.

The New American War Film by Robert Burgoyne provides an in-depth analysis of the recent paradigm shift from the traditional American war narrative to a new style of war film. As Burgoyne notes, images of war and military bravado have always consumed the American psyche. He references Jacques Rancière, the French philosopher, who has described the phenomenon as the “dominant fiction” (ix). The American war film, according to Burgoyne, frequently taps into this phenomenon often painting a “heightened” portrayal of the American experience (x). Furthermore, he notes that concepts like “heroic sacrifice,” “mystic brotherhood,” and “citizen-soldier” appear to have changed in the new American war film (x–xi).

This article examines the portrayal of Father Colin MacInnes in the Scottish Gaelic documentary Gleanntan Ecuador (Jan Pester, 1994). A Catholic priest from South Uist in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, MacInnes moved to Ecuador in 1984 and settled in Comité del Pueblo, a shantytown located in the outskirts of Quito, where he spent over twenty years contributing to local initiatives such as the provision of running water, hospitals, and churches. Central to the film is MacInnes’ efforts to secure funding for a water supply project, achieved through transnational solidarity networks. This article constitutes the first academic approach to the film, bringing together studies in architecture and urban development, anthropology, ethnography, and religious and cultural studies. It argues that, by prioritising MacInnes as a spokesperson for the locals, the film inadvertently reproduces “civilisation and progress” tropes commonly associated with cinematic portrayals of religious missionaries in Ecuador and Latin America. This statement is supported by identifying onscreen binaries between the precariousness of the Ecuadorian township and the idyllic landscapes of the Scottish Isles, emphasising the charity of Scottish parishioners. The film also reiterates the hostility of local communist leaders, highlighting intimidation tactics and extorsion, which speak of its positionality within a postcommunist world.

Gilles Deleuze’s effect on film theory has been immense, and seems only to be growing. D. N. Rodowick’s Deleuze’s Time Machine, Anna Powell’s Deleuze and Horror, Barry Nevin’s Cracking Gilles Deleuze’s Crystal, along with a number of essay collections such as The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, and Rodowick’s Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy document this lively direction in the intellectual response to motion pictures. To this burgeoning subdiscipline can be added Tanya Shilina-Conte’s Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine. Using the motif of the monotone screen to review the entire history of cinema, Shilina-Conte’s treatise is simultaneously a new interpretation of cinema, a commentary on Deleuze’s film theory and philosophy, more broadly, and an aesthetic work in its own right. A topic that might at first appear narrow and recondite proves to be a window on generative absence as such.

This article discusses the research and methods undertaken in the creation of the poetic documentary feature film Dust & Metal (Cát bụi & Kim loại), directed by Esther Johnson (2022). Funded by the British Council, the film offers alternative perspectives of Vietnam, moving beyond Hollywood’s portrayals of the American/Vietnam War. Through a combination of difficult-to-access archive film, crowd-sourced material, newly shot footage, and oral histories, the research reveals unfamiliar histories of freedom in Vietnam that connect with the country’s most ubiquitous mode of transport: the motorbike and, previously, the bicycle. Dust & Metal concurrently acts as a whistle-stop tour through the history of Vietnamese cinema as shot by the film studios supported by the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture.