While mainstream cinema may be called a resolution-oriented cinema, ‘world’ cinema narratives are often populated with displaced feminized/minoritized bodies.

Mati Diop's Atlantique (2019) ends with the female protagonist and her group of friends living in a permanent state of waiting after the boat carrying their loved ones capsizes off the Italian coast. The women become creatures of the spirit world, possessed by the dead, and seek to avenge the drowned. In Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light (2024), winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, the film’s three female protagonists move through Mumbai's streets, subways, and public spaces, not knowing where they will go after the familial and known coordinates of home/marriage/domesticity disappear from their lives. In Celine Song's Past Lives (2023), an improbable future love between childhood sweethearts separated when the female protagonist and her family migrate marks for her the impossibility of a return home.

Long silences, muteness, and expressive states intensify the unspeakable, unanswerable, and untranslatable, and often punctuate such films of displacement through aesthetic conventions that might be likened to the Deleuzian time-image. While the Deleuzian understanding of the time-image involves extended waiting times where nothing happens, where actors behave like spectators, and where paralysis, immobility, and muteness signal a break from the action-image, the seminar’s focus on minoritized/feminized bodies considers such aesthetic practices in terms of their displaced status in many world cinema films. These qualities and aesthetic conventions appear to offer alternatives to commercial/and popular cinemas, but at the same time, make visible resemblances to mainstream cinemas, particularly in the ways in which they continue to enact pressures and demands on feminized/minoritized bodies.

Seminar paper proposals could consider continuities between mainstream/ ‘commercial’ and ‘world’ cinema in their analyses of world cinema films. The panel also welcomes papers that investigate whether the resolution proposed in examples of world cinema films, as alternatives to the popular/mainstream, suggest more emancipatory possibilities for feminized bodies, or continue to make demands not all that different from those seen in commercial, mass, mainstream cinemas. In asking about the function of such figurations in terms of their narrative trajectories in world cinema, paper proposals that consider the infrastructure/economic networks and production practices of world cinema would also be welcome.

Please feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions before the submission deadline.