‘Non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema’ is a diffuse collection of films held together only by the fact that they are not in English and they all bear some kind of nominal or narrative relationship to the tradition of Arthurian story-telling. Despite scant evidence of continuous tradition, including between films in the same language, and long gaps in the corpus, three main strands can be identified: cinematic versions of the Tristan and Iseult legend, films about Perceval and the Holy Grail, and films centred on Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. The third strand is minor: one of the most notable aspects of non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema is the relative paucity of films about Arthur himself, suggesting a distinct relationship to the Arthurian tradition. This corpus of Arthurian screen texts differs from Anglophone cinema in its narrative emphasis, avant-garde techniques, and in its engagement with cultural, historical and ideological concerns that extend well beyond the Anglosphere.

Joanne Leal’s chapter investigates how far and how exactly cinema is able to offer a representational counterbalance to conservative notions of national belonging and exclusionary constructions of what social cohesion should mean. It considers these issues mainly within a Western European framework, asking what film can do to promote intercultural sensitivities within contemporary European contexts in which attitudes to the impact of globalization and particularly the transnational movement of people are often ambivalent and sometimes actively hostile. In particular it examines critical assessments of the positive intercultural impact of watching foreign cinema, the possible political effects of films which encourage empathetic responses to transnational tales contained in generically familiar forms and the critical potential of two kinds of film which uses less conventional cinematic means to represent a globalized social world.