Films with Legs: Crossing Borders with Foreign Language Films

Films With Legs: Crossing Borders with Foreign Language Films addresses the ways international cinematic traditions both erect borders and blur them or tear them down. Each chapter of this book examines real and perceived borders, their representations on the screen and their manifestations in filmic texts that can also be cultural documents and political statements. The fifteen articles included here discuss films made by twenty-four directors, with dialogues in nine foreign languages, representing cultural aspects from twelve countries and five continents. From Algeria to Bulgaria, Germany to Israel, India to Argentina, the films studied in this book have legs that cross many borders and take their audiences on distant journeys. Simultaneously, these films comment on the ever-expanding nature of cinema itself, of filmic language and of film as language, and discuss how borders are constructed on the screen, not just in fences and walls and boundaries, but also in dialogue and dialect, speech and accent and silence.