Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is Distinguished Professor of Film at The University of Lincoln, UK. She is the author of Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (2000) and Little Friends: Children’s Film and Media Culture in New China (2005), as well as many edited collections including Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture (2014). Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at Corpus Christi College, UK.Sarah Wright is Reader in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

This terrific new collection provides the emerging, vibrant, interdisciplinary field of writing on the child in cinema with a welcome new direction. Reflecting upon the shifting global geopolitical boundaries of our everyday world, it provocatively challenges, uncouples and rethinks accepted correlations between cinematic depictions of childhood and nationhood. The scholarship is engaging, often eye opening, in its illumination of the complexities of depictions of children (adopted, deported, disappeared, “left behind”), in cinemas ranging from Bollywood to South Korean animation to Argentine stop-motion to Australian indigenous films. This book will speak to anyone who was ever moved by a film about childhood to reflect on their own history, their own place within the world.

• Introduction: nation, film, child Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (University of New South Wales, Australia); Emma Wilson (Corpus Christi College, UK); Sarah Wright (University of London, UK)Home and away1. ‘A bath, a toilet and a field’: dreaming and deprivation in Lynne Ramsay’s RatcatcherVicky Lebeau (University of Sussex, UK)2. Lost and found: children in Indigenous Australian cinemaGreg Dolgopolov (University of New South Wales, Australia)3. ‘Away from girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s BluebeardEmma Wilson (Corpus Christi College, UK)Disappearance and removal4. The lost children of Latvia: deportees and postmemory in Dzintra Geka’s The Children of Siberia Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Klara Bruveris (University of New South Wales, Australia)5. Among the Nations: Children as Czechs, Germans and Jews in post-1980 Czech cinematic representations of the Second World WarJan Lánícek (University of New South Wales, Australia)6. Child, cinema, dictatorship: Ignacio Agüero’s One Hundred Children Waiting for a TrainSarah Wright (University of London, UK)Education and Serious Games7. Graphic tales: class, violence and South Korean childhood in Sang-Ho Yeon’s The King of PigsSusan Danta (University of New South Wales, Australia)Citizenship in the classroom: the politicisation of child subjects in Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have and Laurent Cantet’s The ClassVictoria FlanaganEducation, destiny, and national identity in Raúl Ruiz’s Manoel on the Island of WondersStefan Solomon (University of New South Wales, Australia)An allegorical childhood: identity and coming of age in Terry Loane’s Mickybo and MeJennifer R. Beckett (University of Melbourne, Australia)PerformanceTerrorism and trainers in a transnational remake: child labour and commodity culture in the Bollywood adaptation of New Iranian Cinema’s Children of HeavenMichael Lawrence (University of Sussex, UK)The child as hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah DimancheHannah Kilduff (University of Cambridge, UK)Beiqing, kuqing and national sentimentality in Liu Junyi’s Left-behind ChildrenZitong Qiu and Maria Elena Indelicato (Zhejiang University, China)Children’s toys, Argentine nationhood and blondness in Albertina Carri’s Barbie Gets Sad Too and Néstor F. and Martín C.’s Easy MoneyJordana Blejmar (University of Liverpool, UK)BibliographyFilmography