ABSTRACT
Minor transnational cinema, in the Deleuze-Guattari sense, would be not only that cinema made by minoritized people, but also films made in “minor” genres, in a minor, dissident key, or in “minor” genres and formats, or engaging minor, disreputable emotions, with a fraught and often combative relation to the dominant film discourses and language. In linguistic terms, Arabic is major in the Middle East but minor in the US or the U.K.; Yoruba is major in Nigeria but minor in Brazil and so forth. “Minor” countries can also be relatively “major” producers of cinema through disproportionate production. A nation without a nation-state such as Palestine has produced scores of filmmakers and films, in a manner out-of-synch with their relatively small demographic numbers. Palestinian cinema, representing a nation of 10 million souls, many of them dispersed around the world, is perforce transnational in that it is not the product of an industry “on the ground.”.
