[Commlist] New book: Kinotopias: Film, Place and Belonging in a Bordered World

New book. “Kinotopias: Film, Place and Belonging in a Bordered World”

Kevin Smets, Lennart Soberon, Irene Gutiérrez-Torres and Silvia 
Almenara-Niebla

2026, Edinburgh University Press (Political Cinemas series)

Available as open access e-book

Information and download via 
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-kinotopias.html 
<https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-kinotopias.html>

Examines film’s vital role in making and unmaking geopolitical and 
cultural borders

  * Based on original research across the borders of Ireland and the UK,
    Spain and Morocco and Turkey and Syria as well as among diasporic
    filmmakers
  * Covers hundreds of films from different genres as well as
    understudied film practices such as amateur film, participatory
    filmmaking and film activism
  * Goes well beyond studies of border representation, also covering
    production, distribution and reception of film
  * Offers an interdisciplinary framework to capture relations between
    film, place and belonging

Combining original research with insights from social sciences, 
philosophy and film theory, it argues that film can effectively capture 
both material and socio-cultural dimensions of borders and their 
underlying tensions.

 From popular cinema using border surveillance optics to militant and 
amateur filmmaking by borderlanders, “Kinotopias: Film, Place and 
Belonging in a Bordered World” traces diverging strategies that use film 
to enforce or overcome borders, demonstrating how film can become a 
political instrument for belonging. Introducing the concept of 
debordering film, the book urges a rethinking of how film is made, 
studied and understood, foregrounding neglected forms, voices and 
spatial experiences.

Through an ambitious conceptual framework stemming from research on 
highly politicised borders in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, 
“Kinotopias” makes a strong case for the social and political power of 
film as a tool of resistance and reimagination.

Praise by Prof. Myria Georgiou (London School of Economics & Politics 
Science): “/Kinotopias/ offers a much-needed cultural perspective into a 
world of ever-expanding borders. Its rigorous, but also creative and 
perceptive approach to borderlands through filmmaking, ethnography and 
participatory cinema practices reveals them as sites of power but also 
of people and culture. A must read for anyone interested in migration, 
belonging and the cultural politics of film.”

Contents:

Introduction

Part I: Kinotopias and border cinemas

1. Kinotopias and the social spatiality of film

2. The border as black box: Documentary cinema and the forensic 
geographies of displacement

Part II: Border cultures and representations

3. Phantom pains: Brexit-era border cinema and the anxiety of the unseen

4. Cinematic autonomy: Contested space and film in North and East Syria 
(Rojava)

Part III: Methodologies and interventions

5. Emotions and borders: Feminist geopolitics and intimate film experiences

6. Vernacular border cinema: Participatory filmmaking as placemaking

Afterword: Debordering film

The research for this book was funded through the European Research 
Council Starting Grant “Reel Borders” (#948278).

***

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