From Iceland to Iran, from Singapore to Scotland, a growing intellectual and cultural wave of production is taking cinema beyond the borders of its place of origin: exploring faraway places, interacting with barely known peoples, and making new localities imaginable. Previously entrenched spatial divisions no longer function as firmly fixed grid coordinates, the hierarchical position of place as ‘centre’ is subverted, and new forms of representation become possible.

Cinema at the Periphery assembles critical writing by authors such as Faye Ginsburgh, Mette Hjort, Sheldon Lu, Duncan Petrie, Kay Dickinson, Lucia Nagib, Bill Marshall, and others, all exploring issues of the periphery in terms of locations, practices, methods, and themes, including questions of transnationality, place, space, passage, and migration. Focusing on case studies of small national cinemas located at the global margins but also of filmmaking that comes from peripheral cultures, like Palestinian ‘stateless’ cinema or Australian Aboriginal films, the volume highlights the inextricable interrelationship between production modes, circulation channels, and the emerging narratives of histories and identities they enable.