Cinema as intercultural communication

Joanne Leal’s chapter investigates how far and how exactly cinema is able to offer a representational counterbalance to conservative notions of national belonging and exclusionary constructions of what social cohesion should mean. It considers these issues mainly within a Western European framework, asking what film can do to promote intercultural sensitivities within contemporary European contexts in which attitudes to the impact of globalization and particularly the transnational movement of people are often ambivalent and sometimes actively hostile. In particular it examines critical assessments of the positive intercultural impact of watching foreign cinema, the possible political effects of films which encourage empathetic responses to transnational tales contained in generically familiar forms and the critical potential of two kinds of film which uses less conventional cinematic means to represent a globalized social world