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Building upon the concepts of littérature-monde (citing a 2007 manifesto) and cinéma-monde (citing a 2013 article by Bill Marshall), this introduction aims to explore the opportunities and limitations of adopting the label of ‘cinéma-monde’ as a critical framework through which to approach a corpus of films linked to the francophone world and its production networks. To this end, it discusses the Trophées Francophones du cinéma (created in 2013), the first cinema awards specifically dedicated to internationally produced francophone films, as well as the concepts of ‘accented cinemas’ (a term borrowed from Hamid Naficy), ‘franco-zones’ and cinematic ‘hubs’ in order to further delineate cinéma-monde and articulate a decentred approach to global French-language filmmaking. A kaleidoscope is forwarded as a metaphor because it involves looking at the world through a particular yet variable and adjustable optic. The introduction ends with a summary of the fourteen chapters and three epilogues, which comprise the volume.

This chapter compares and contrasts Abderrahmane Sissako’s better-known films with the English-language novels of the Afropolitanism movement, whose African-born characters all share a familiarity with the realities of the Global North. The chapter further surveys the most celebrated films of the Mauritanian-born, Malian-raised, Russian-trained, French-based director, demonstrating how they dispute the universal narrative on globalisation and concomitantly root themselves in the specific context of francophone Africa. The chapter contains a detailed discussion of La Vie sur terre/Life on Earth (1998, Mali/France/Mauritania), Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness (2002, France/Mauritania), and Timbuktu (2014, Mauritania/France).

This concluding chapter locates broad shifts in French/francophone cinematic mediations of lesbian desire from 1936 to 2002, considering the extent to which national specificities have emerged: that is, differences between films from metropolitan France and from francophone Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and Africa. It also teases out the implications of the predominance of femme as opposed to butch lesbian configurations within the corpus as a whole. The book covers the work of forty-eight male and forty-one female film directors. From 1936 to 1979 inclusive, male-directed vastly outnumbered female-directed French-language films representing lesbian desire. Jacqueline Audry, Nelly Kaplan and Chantal Akerman were the only women to explore sapphism on screen prior to 1980; none, it should be stressed, ventured into this marginalised territory before having positioned herself more or less in the cinematic centre. Of course, male directors outnumbered female directors generally in French and francophone cinema until the 1980s, so in itself this gender imbalance is probably unremarkable. What is of interest is the growing domination of female over male directors treating lesbian desire from the 1980s.

This chapter examines the influence of Italian neorealism on the Francophone African cinema of the nationalist period (1960>–75), and discusses the historical, institutional, and aesthetic affinities between these practices, which point to similar conditions, comparable histories, and a “convergence in necessity.” They show that African cinema did not become global in one fell swoop. Its globality was present from the beginning, nurtured by scholarship, aesthetic choices, and the cinema culture of the filmmakers.