ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the ways the interpretation of cinematic material can be guided to serve a specific cultural diplomatic agenda. It analyses the plot summaries of a collection of films produced in Japan, India, and the USSR included in a film catalogue Orient: A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) together with the British Film Institute in 1959. While the countries featured in the catalogue approached the catalogue’s aim of promoting intercultural understanding with very different aspects in mind, the catalogue provides occasionally contracting depictions of the differing interests and needs of the member states in question, guided by UNESCO’s attempts to propagate the unifying ideal of hope in the pursuit of its agenda of “the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind”. Focusing on the question of how the representations of the vaguely defined East were constructed in the catalogue, the chapter suggests that with the catalogue project, UNESCO argued for the importance of adapting to a new world in which humanity was not one divided by internal differences but one united by hope for a better future.
