World Film Studies

This course explores the emergence and international significance of the New Iranian Cinema from the 1980s to the early 2000s, a period often described as Iran’s Second New Wave. Arising in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution and under conditions of censorship, restriction, and ideological control, this cinema developed an extraordinary visual language that transformed limitation into creative possibility.

Through close analysis of one key film per week, as well as discussion of clips from other films, the course examines how Iranian filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzai, Amir Naderi, and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad redefined cinematic realism, narrative form, and authorship. These films gained global resonance not despite their local specificity, but because of it, offering subtle reflections on childhood, ethics, gender, power, and the relationship between life and fiction.

Spanning fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms, the course considers why this cinema travelled so widely on the international festival circuit, and how it came to stand as one of the most influential bodies of world cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century. 
 

From revolutionary manifestos to globally acclaimed auteurs, Latin American cinema has long been one of the most politically engaged and formally inventive film traditions in the world. This course offers an introduction to the rich and diverse cinemas of Latin America, tracing how filmmakers across the region have responded to colonial legacies, dictatorship, inequality, urbanisation, and globalisation.
Across six weeks, we will move between national cinemas and transnational perspectives, exploring key movements such as Third Cinema and Cinema Novo, alongside influential filmmakers from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba. The course will also consider diasporic films that reflect migration and cross-border identities. Throughout, we will examine how Latin American cinema has functioned not only as artistic expression, but also as political intervention, historical memory, and cultural self-definition.
 

This 6-week evening course will take learners on a cinematic journey through China’s “reform and opening up” era, from the end of the Cultural Revolution through to the mid-2000s.
“Opening up” involved a series of economic and societal reforms to rebuild the country after the tumultuous Mao years. Each week will explore different generations of China’s cinema - beginning by setting the context with the Golden Age and Model Revolutionary Operas, then deep diving into the reform era of the 1980s - 2000s spotlighting Fifth Generation films such as Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and Sixth Generation films such as Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006), and films of the more recent 'urban generation' and new documentary movements.
Each session will map China's evolving cinematic journey against the nation’s local and global progression into the modern super-power that it is today.