This book tells inspirational stories of women who have worked with and within communities to bring stories to life through screenwriting. As such the book evidences that women’s work is important; that ‘films can change lives’. The collection divides the chapters according to worlds, in recognition of the fact that though we live on one planet, the conditions of existence are vastly different between first and third worlds; between the wealthiest and the poorest.



Each chapter shows how attitudes have shifted, policies have been rewritten, and life experiences and horizons have been altered for specific communities through these instances of screenwriting. The themes touched upon include gender, race, disability, culture, war, colonization, labour relations, political ideologies, to name a few. The parallels found amongst these themes across national, religious and cultural divides, are also telling. The book is wide in its scope, considering screenwriting a skill which can apply to games, social media, music videos, virtual reality … in fact, any of the burgeoning formats alive on our devices and through constantly evolving platforms. All are considered screenwriting.



The book is a celebration of the female writers who have told screen stories that educate and heal.



The book suits readers across disciplines, including screenwriting, filmmaking, women’s studies, history, sociology, and many other areas.

The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates, discussions and research from the previous year, as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles, appearing for the first time in English, to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.

The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that has not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies, visual arts, performing arts, media and cultural studies, the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

This book examines film reviewing and screenwriting as key sites of cultural mediation, providing new insights on the relationship between criticism and reviewing, as well as the way reviewers handle concepts of story, dialogue, and narrative.



Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the cultural field, and his theory of taste, the book provides an assessment of the place of film reviewing in contemporary screen culture. The book analyses a case study comprised of ten years of television scripts of the Australian film reviewing programme, At the Movies (2004–2014). Hosted by two of Australia’s most eminent film critics, Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton, for over two decades, this study of At the Movies provides a unique window into film reviewing, movie consumption, and wider cultural attitudes in this period of Australian cultural history. It examines the programme’s cultural significance, and the contribution of Margaret and David to screen culture.



This book makes a significant contribution to an under-studied area of media studies (the review), screenwriting research through the analysis of broadcast scripts, and cultural studies through the study of an important television programme.

Nigeria is one of the nations in which same-sex relations are still criminalized. Reflecting this sociopolitical and cultural context, Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, has traditionally portrayed homosexual characters in largely villainous roles. However, the industry seems to have undergone shifts from staunch heteronormative narratives with unease towards homosexuality to tolerance and even open-ended film stories. This article explores the various characterizations of LGBTQ+ persons in Nollywood to underscore the advances in the industry’s narration of LGBTQ+ individuals in Nigeria. The article engages in a qualitative study of select Nollywood films focusing on the changing thematic, characterization and narrative views of homosexuality. This article provides insights into how Nollywood cinemas may offer a glimpse into the evolving understanding of queerness in Nigerian society.

Documentary may be becoming the new science fiction, as more films set their sights on the future, which is increasingly being represented as all but lost. In this rush toward these catastrophic representations, this chapter posits a new genre to be considered: the Apocalypse documentary. Not only do these films align with the assertion that the end of the world may be easier to imagine than the end of capitalism, but they are also distinctly gendered, as if the feminized labor of “staying with the trouble” is not nearly as captivating or spectacular as envisioning our own demise.

Documentary mise-en-scène processes the camera-take circumstance. The take reflects being-there in a particular mode of existence (the reflecting one), staging to a camera that coalesces individuations. Gathered, takes make films (or series) with diverse functions of enunciation sustaining ethical ensembles. The documentary voice structures a mega-enunciator defining how audiovisual emission-ending (films) compose multiple styles of mise-en-scène (the epistemological; the recoiled voice; the interacting disposition; the reflexive auto-conscient; the sensuous touching). Documentary film can be at large with this ending, ‘body-touching’ a differential gap. The machinical camera-subject is the myriad surface of reflecting camera-monads communicating their agency through the visibility of empiricity.

This chapter argues that a polyphonic mode, particularly one based upon the act of reading and performing shared texts aloud and listening for responses across diverse and intersectional identities, can be one way to approach collaborative documentary production. This argument is evidenced in three case studies: Yours in Sisterhood (Irene Lusztig 2018), The Cancer Journals Revisited (Lana Lin 2018), and J.R. and Alice Rohrwacher's Omelia Contadina (2020). In the first two films, participants self-narrate their experience in response to temporally removed texts; in Omelia Contadina, an in-situ mourning ritual includes a performance of multiple elegiac texts as one, intertwining individual voices in a collective political action. Each filmmaker collaborates with participants to visualize and hear a latent community to confront a distinct crisis-systemic sexism, breast cancer, and the destruction of traditional farming. Classic and contemporary examples of polyphony explore the contours of the mode.

While Utilitarian film has often been viewed as a sub-set or close relation of documentary studies, this chapter considers the distinctions between the two, and the informative and productive ways that these distinct fields shore up each other's definitional boundaries.

The recent Utilitarian Filmmaking in Australia (1945-1980) research project offers concrete examples of how several different kinds of Utilitarian film (sponsored works by commercial entities and government bodies, ‘data’ and scientific filmmaking, raw footage) are related to documentary forms. It also demonstrates the way this oft-maligned film form stands adjacent to documentary politics and poetics. In considering utilitarian films through a media archaeological lens, these works offer the reminder of documentary's broad ranging, multimedia history throughout the 20th century.

In March 2021 Seaspiracy launched on Netflix and quickly became one of the ten most watched films on the platform. Produced and directed by British independent documentary maker Ali Tabrizi, the documentary Șinvestigation’ dramatically catalogues the human and environmental impacts of commercial fishing, revealing corruption, slavery and cruelty. Seaspiracy is a call to action, and many appear to have heeded the call, pledging to give up fish or ‘joining the movement’ via social media. There is even the option to buy Seaspiracy merchandise or purchase a vegan meal planning service. Celebrities and influencers have helped to spread the word, as have environmental activists and community groups. The filmmakers have been able to leverage this interest to raise funds and garner support for political action. We will explore Seaspiracy as exemplary of a new mode of political documentary that explicitly seeks to produce audience engagements, leveraged within a specific political context. Drawing on recent explorations of media engagement we consider the ‘push-pull’ dynamics (Hill 2019) between audiences and producers, as well as the increasingly porous boundaries between private spaces of media consumption and opportunities to act within the public sphere.