Cinemas of Global Solidarity

Cinemas of Global Solidarity brings together new essays from some of the most influential scholars within film and media studies, as well as a number of emerging international scholars, to re-examine the entwined legacies of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial internationalism in the cinema with a view toward contemporary forms of political moving image culture. The contributions to this collection show how film, in both its aesthetic strategies and broader circuits of distribution and exhibition, has worked as an instrument of global solidarity, imagining alternatives to the predatory expansion of finance capital and the militarized borders of the nation state. Remaining particularly attentive to the liberation movements of the Global South and the internal colonies of the Global North, these essays open onto a broader interrogation of the problem of solidarity-building through moving image media, its multivalent histories and contemporary resonances. Cinemas of Global Solidarity thus responds to a growing impetus within the field to re-examine both the influential and the overlooked film radicalisms of the past in order to better conceptualize the role of cinema within the ideological battlelines of late capitalism. In establishing linkages between these unique frameworks, it argues for the need to reckon with the longer history of internationalist solidarity to catalyze new paths for the liberatory possibilities of film within global media culture.

Masha Salazkina is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico (2009), World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinites and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (2023) and Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (2024). She has also co-edited Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (2014), Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (2021) and Teaching Migration in Literature, Film, and Media (2025). Matthew Croombs is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the intersection between anti-colonial film, documentary, and film theory, and has been published in Screen, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Cinema Journal), Discourse, Third Text, Quarterly Review of Film and Television Studies, and several other journals. He is the author of Cinema Against State Terror: French Anti-colonial Documentary and the Algerian War (forthcoming).