Although nation states present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter borders undermine utopian notions of a borderless Europe or USA. Contributions to this book focus on the motifs of borderscapes as they are represented and used in transnational cinematographies. It was originally published in the Transnational Cinemas journal.

Introduction - Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary 1. Walled in/walled out in the West Bank: performing separation walls in Hany Abu-Assad's Omar 2. Mediating migration in Ceuta, Melilla and Barcelona: border thinking and transnationalism from below in independent documentary 3. Spaces of becoming: the Stockholm Film Workshop as a transnational site of film production 4. An island of madness: the social force of mental fortresses - a visual essay 5. After the wall: touring the European border space in post-1989 French-language cinema 6. Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection and political film-making: Illegal bodies in motion 7. Looking from the Border: A Cosmopolitan Approach to Contemporary Cinema

Ana Cristina Mendes is Assistant Professor of English Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her areas of specialization are cultural and postcolonial studies, with an emphasis on the representations and reception of alterity in the global cultural marketplace.

John Sundholm is Professor of Film Studies and Head of the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has published widely on minor cinemas and memory studies. He also works as a film programmer/curator and is affiiated to the PhD program in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland.