While mainstream cinema may be called a resolution-oriented cinema, ‘world’ cinema often emphasizes displacement, particularly for feminized/minoritized bodies, and in many instances proposes displacement as a resolution.  

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 for childhood sweethearts separated when the female protagonist and her family migrate, also marks 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 closely resemble the qualities of 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 panel’s focus on feminized bodies considers such aesthetic practices in terms of the displaced status of feminized/minoritized bodies in many ‘world’ cinema films. These qualities and aesthetic conventions of ‘world’ cinema appear to offer alternatives to mainstream and popular cinemas, but at the same time, make visible resemblances to mainstream cinemas in the pressures and demands on feminized/minoritized bodies. The panel's focus on feminized/minoritized bodies would consider such continuities between mainstream/ ‘commercial’ and ‘world’ cinema despite the displaced status offered to such figures in many ‘world’ cinema films. 

The panel welcomes papers that investigate whether the resolutions proposed in examples of ‘world’ cinema films, as alternatives, 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, the seminar invites paper proposals that also take on analyses of the infrastructure/economic networks and production practices of ‘world’ cinema in terms of the value of displacement as resolution for feminized/minoritized bodies in ‘world’ cinema.