ABSTRACT
How does film still reflect, refract, and transform cultural identity while shaping new forms of subjectivity in an increasingly transnational world? Economic transnationality implies a deep interdependence between the developed and the developing world, somehow deconstructing older, simplistic polarizations such as that between North and South, for example. Contingent terms such as First World and Third World might no longer signify the same valence of economic and political power that they did until very recently. Skyrocketing levels of unemployment, drug trafficking, child labor, prostitution, and sexual tourism in the “tropics” are just a few symptoms that, depicted on screen, lend authenticity to the representation of social ills and other forms of violence in contemporary international cinema.
