ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a cinematic disappointment: a cautionary tale of the sparse landscape of a national/domestic film culture giving way to foreign interests and global aspirations, and a seeming desert of imagination. It suggests that intersectionality may be a valuable way of complicating constructions of Arab cinema and its storytelling functions. The recent proliferation of multi-strand narratives in world cinema is illustrative of the ways a single narrative feature film can open up diversifying narrative possibilities. In contemporary Arab cinema, it serves as a means to tease out myriad differences including cultural and racial/ethnic perceptions, regionalism and nationality, class and occupation, age and generation, and ideological and religious perspectives. Arab films and filmmakers have variously asserted or contested the nation-state and national/cultural identity. Arab films may represent interstitial and contested spaces; reappropriate and subvert cinematic stereotypes; engage with exilic, diasporic, and glocalised experiences.
