Debbie Olson is assistant professor of English at Missouri Valley College.

A valuable text for readers interested in cinematic representations of childhood. Comprehensive, wide-ranging and truly international in scope, it successfully moves beyond the geopolitical parochialism that has characterized much of the prior scholarship in this area. While encompassing films both iconic and relatively unknown in Western criticism, the basic question of how the screen image of childhood reflects dominant social and cultural practices remains central throughout the book.

• IntroductionSouth America1. “Girls on the Screen: Gender in Contemporary Argentine Cinema” Carolina Rocha2. “Children in Brazilian Cinematography” Fabiana de Amorim Marcello3. “From the Countryside to the City: a Boy’s Journey and a World to Know” Lucia Rabello de Castro, Paula Uglione, and Adelaide Rezende de SouzaAfrica4.“Turning the Page: Memories of French Algerian Childhoods on Screen” Christa Jones5. “Forms and Variations of Children’s Relationship to Space in Francophone African Fiction Films” Caroline Lardy6. “Surfing to Adulthood: Childhood, Coming of Age and National Transitions in the South African Fiction Film Otelo Burning (2011)” Christine SingerMiddle East7. “Children’s Groups in the Young State of Israel: Simplicity and Complexity in the Cult Movie ?asamba & the Black Handkerchief Gang (1971)” Einat Baram Eshel8. “’Stolen/Lost Childhood’ and the Inherent Failures of Cinematic Representations: The Case of Palestinian Child Labor” Yoad Eliaz,, Omri Grinberg and Walaa Ghanayim9. “The Representation of Urban Female Teenagers in Iranian Cinema” Mina Rezaei, Negin Golravesh Fekry, and Seyyed Mohsen HabibiSouthern & Eastern Europe10. “Lost Boys of the Franco Regime: Masculinity, Memory, and Childhood in Recent Spanish Film” Jessica Davidson11. “The Figure of the Child as a Contradictory Signifier in Russian Cinema” Michael Brodski12. “Through a French Lens: Romanian Kids and the Western Narrative of Childhood” Onoriu ColacelIndia13. “Kaakka Muttai: Tamil Children in Global/World Cinema” Swarnavel Eswaran14. “‘Cracking’ Nations/notions: A Study of Little Lenny in Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth” Paromita DebJapan15. “Westernization, Identity and Emerging Notions of Childhood in the Films of Ozu Yasujiro” Kelly J. Hansen16. “Kiku and Isamu: Beyond the Shitty Realism of Mixed Race Orphans inPostwar Japan” Kaori Mori Want17. “Abandon the Young in Tokyo: Yoshitaro Nomura’s The Demon and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows” Kenta McGrathChina18., “The Abducted Child Movie in Chinese Cinema” Kobe Chan Yan Chuen19., “The Alternative Viewfinder of History: Child Vision in Chinese and Sinophone Cinema” Belinda Qian He20. “We are all Useful People”: Useful Children and the Notion of Guai in Transnational Chinese Cinema” Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Sin Wen Lau, and Lennon Yao-chung Chang,21. “Parable of the Lost Child: Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less” Juanita ButNew Zealand22. “Talking Back to the Mainstream – Pop Culture and the Child in the Films of Taika Waititi” Caroline Grose