ABSTRACT
As a feature film screenwriter and director I have been strongly influenced by what we generically call ‘world cinema’ – films from countries with longestablished traditions of filmmaking like Japan and Brazil, to those regions more recently arrived on the global stage like Iran, Indonesia and Mexico, and the central Asian states of Nepal and Bhutan. I have also worked first-hand with writers from Bhutan, Belize and Indonesia, as I will detail below. In this chapter I will examine more closely some of the notions of writing, and writing practices, adopted by world cinema screenwriters, and how these might challenge our own views of both screenwriting and the critical approaches we use towards the screenplay.
