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This chapter discusses the historical and industrial context of City of God (2002). It examines World Cinema, Latin American cinema, Brazilian cinema, and Cinema Novo. From 1960 to 1964, the first phase of Cinema Novo established modern cinema in Brazil. It also transformed its image outside the country by reason of its critical success. Cinema Novo's image of Brazil was one of exploitation, violence, and deprivation. The chapter then details the production of City of God, from novel to screen. Anthropologist Paulo Lins, who grew up in the City of God, wrote the book on which the film was based. He began academic research on the drug dealers in the favelas and turned this into a 700-page novel. Director Fernando Meirelles then bought the film rights and wanted to make the film to bring attention to the poverty and deprivation of the slums. The ‘great international distributor’ was Miramax.

Chapter 11 employs a feminist lens to situate women filmmakers within a wider global context in which all women’s cinema can be considered to be “world cinema,” set apart from local contexts that fail to encompass women’s film practices in terms of resources, space, and mobility. Advocating a perspective advanced by Patricia White in Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, Belinda Smaill proposes that women filmmakers should be viewed within “whole world approaches” that comprehensively address the context of production, circulation, representation, and image of each director. While tracking the mobility of female directors, Smaill points out that while it is difficult for women to achieve employment as feature directors in the U.S., it is even more difficult to gain access to the industry from outside the U.S. Hollywood is an exclusive domain, making Bier’s transnational American work a critical site for investigation. With Serena, Smaill contends, Bier cements her place as a director who takes on the world by lending her authorial signature to a complex manifestation of world cinema.

The introduction to the book identifies the female pioneers of documentary in the Arab area. It paints the historical context in which these women have been making documentaries, looking across borders within the Arab World and across transnational regions, within the form, in the seventies and eighties, nineties and two thousands. The theoretical approach is rooted in feminist film studies and Third Cinema theory. Using Ella Shohat’s writings on women making films in a post-Third Worldist and feminist reality, the chapter specifies those aspects of Third Cinema that have been neglected. Painting a socio-political and historical context for the films under discussion, it looks at the cultural history of documentary as well as thematic and stylistic tendencies in the Arab world. From an examination of Third Cinema and its focus on documentary the chapter moves on to New Arab Cinema (or ‘Cinema Chabab’) and its attitude towards melodrama and realism. This ‘new’ approach to the transnational documentary includes a clearer, perhaps more practical look at developing ideas of production, distribution and spectatorship.

This chapter examines the ways that Theo Angelopoulos forged a cinema of demystification, whose individual films ‘contested history as the justifying discourse of power and authority’. Angelopoulos' trilogy of History includes Days of '36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters. This trilogy is one of the most radical ‘political’ interventions attempted within the established visual poetics of World Cinema. Both historically and culturally, these films were produced at the beginning and the end of a period of extreme experimentation with visual representation, becoming in their own distinct ways meditations on the limits of representability, on the function of cinematic images, and on the visualisation of collective memory. The chapter offers a reading of Angelopoulos' historical trilogy and shows that all three films articulated an integrated vision of how structures and institutions work together to deprive contemporary citizens of their agency and self-determination.