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This series aims to produce new critical volumes from an interdisciplinary perspective which bring influential, yet neglected, international directors to the attention of a new audience of scholars and students in film studies.

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15 results in ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Jocelyne Saab
  • Films, Artworks and Cultural Events for the Arab World
  • Edited by Mathilde Rouxel, Stefanie Van de Peer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 September 2026
  • Jocelyne Saab was one of the most important female filmmakers pioneering a sense of international emancipatory world cinema from the early 1970s to her death in 2019. This book is the first English-language study dedicated to her entire oeuvre which consisted of journalism, documentaries, experimental and feature films, as well as photography, art exhibitions and curation, and film festival organisation.

    In this book, a range of international scholars integrates her work into a cohesive study of all aspects of her oeuvre – filmic, activist and artistic – representing the global significance of Saab’s work and the ongoing resonance of her ideals and activism in a worldwide perspective.

ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir
  • Iqra Shagufta Cheema, Stefanie Van de Peer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 September 2026
  • This book offers a transnational, internationalist-feminist approach to the oeuvre of award-winning director, writer, and curator, Annemarie Jacir.

    Palestinian film culture is unique due to its geopolitical circumstances, including continued colonialism and occupation, and the refugeeship of its citizens. The scholarship on the politics of film and its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – including activist work, international solidarity films, and work on Palestinian documentaries – is usually defined by historical overviews of geopolitical events and developments. In contrast, this book offers an auteur-focused study of a global artist influenced by but not limited to the political discourse surrounding the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

    Jacir is a Palestinian woman whose work is recognised globally as innovative, politically challenging, and genre-crossing. The book offers an in-depth study of her films and other works by locating it in a geospatial, sociocultural, and critical theoretical framework. It critically analyses Annemarie Jacir’s development as an artist, filmmaker, and curator of film.

ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa
  • Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema
  • Nuno Barradas Jorge
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    26 May 2026
  • This is the first English-language study of internationally acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, examining the cultural, production and exhibition contexts of his feature films, shorts and video installations. It situates Costa’s filmmaking within the contexts of Portuguese, European and global art film, looking into his working practices alongside the impact of digital video, forms of collaborative authorship, and the intricate dialogue between modes of production and aesthetics.

    Considering the exhibition, circulation and reception of Costa’s creative output in settings such as film festivals, the art gallery circuit and the home video market, ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa provides an essential critical analysis of this major filmmaker – as well as of the multifaceted production and consumption practices that surround contemporary art cinema.

ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko
  • Edited by Lida Oukaderova
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    19 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • Despite the brief span of her directorial career, lasting from 1963 to 1979, the Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko produced a remarkable body of work, one that received an expansive national and international attention and led her to winning the Golden Bear Awards at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. Refocus: The Cinema of Larisa Shepitko is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive, methodologically diverse analysis of Shepitko's oeuvre, demonstrating the ongoing significance of her work for filmmakers and scholars alike. The book not only considers the emergence of Shepitko's cinema within Soviet political and cultural history but examines its continued relevance for thinking about such pressing contemporary issues as war and trauma, history, memory and subjectivity, and ecology and the environment.

ReFocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland
  • Elzbieta Ostrowska
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as 'Europa', 'Europa (1990)' to episodes of the HBO series 'The Wire'. In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland's authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women's, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland's career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.

ReFocus: The Films of Joachim Trier
  • Anne Gjelsvik
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    11 February 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • This is the first book-length academic study of Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier's films. The book, written by an author who has followed his work closely for ten years, offers an introduction to all five feature films, from his debut 'Reprise' (2006) to his recent success 'The Worst Person in the Word' (2021). The book investigates the style and themes of Trier's films through a prologue, nine chapters, and an epilogue. The main section of the book looks closely at selected tropes across Trier's films, such as memory, time, and identity, as well as his style and his innovative use of montage, voice-over and settings. The prologue place Trier in contemporary Norwegian cinema and discuss his different inspirations and collaborations. An interview with Joachim Trier makes up the epilogue of the book.

ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen
  • Edited by Thomas Austin
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    27 January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2023
  • Working across a range of formats, from video art and gallery installations to independent cinema to Hollywood to the BBC, Steve McQueen's prodigious output has been marked by formal ambition and political urgency. This vital collection interrogates his body of work, its political, aesthetic and institutional dimensions, and the interfaces between them. It offers critical insights into McQueen's engagements with race, gender, the body, love and pain, and his abiding self-reflexive interest in the potential of multiple audio-visual forms. The first director to win both the Turner Prize and an Oscar for best picture, McQueen is probably the most important working British film maker. This book explores the controversies as well as the achievements in his stellar career so far.

ReFocus: The Films of Jane Campion
  • Edited by Alexia L. Bowler, Adele Jones
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    11 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2023
  • Jane Campion's work shines a spotlight on gender relations, often through complex female characters and an innovative approach to the screen representation of women functioning at the edges of society. Campion is vocal about the under-representation of women in the film industry more generally, though her commitment to the notion of feminism is tempered by an ambivalence towards the term. Despite this ambiguity, Campion's continued focus on women merits an exploration of her work through a feminist lens particularly in the wake of #MeToo, which has had a wide-ranging impact on the film industry.

ReFocus: The Films of Kim Ki-young
  • Edited by Chung-kang Kim
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2023
  • World-renowned South Korean directors, including Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, cite Kim Ki-young as being the greatest Korean influence on their work. During his thirty year career, Kim Ki-young produced thirty-three films and became revered by critics within the national and international community as one of the few South Korean 'auteurs'.

    As the first comprehensive scholarly volume on Kim Ki-young in English, ReFocus: The Films of Kim Ki-young covers his entire career and history of cinematic work, highlighting the thematic and stylistic singularity of Kim's oeuvre, which was produced relative to the specific historical and cultural conditions of post-war South Korea. It offers an innovative departure point from which to explore South Korean film relative to the wider history of world cinema, in addition to situating Kim's work within the broader fields of Korean modern history, transnational cinema and cultural studies.

ReFocus: The Films of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

ReFocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel

ReFocus: The Films of Shyam Benegal
  • Edited by Sneha Kar Chaudhuri, Ramit Samaddar
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    17 November 2023
    Print publication:
    31 March 2023
  • Shyam Benegal is widely perceived as one of the most influential Indian filmmakers, yet his voluminous body of work remains relatively under-studied in contemporary film scholarship.

    To help fill this critical lacuna, ReFocus: The Films of Shyam Benegal undertakes a closer look at Benegal's films, a trailblazing auteur who successfully redefined the contours of non-commercial Hindi language cinema. This addition to ReFocus: The International Directors Series will consider how Benegal, over the course of his forty year career, used cinema as a potent medium to narrate the story of a nation in continuous transition.

    The thirteen essays in the volume will explore how Benegal's films articulate his concerns over caste, class, gender, religion, and other allied social, economic and political problems characterizing the Indian subcontinent. This collection also includes a full-length interview with Shyam Benegal that investigates his perspectives on the art of film-making.

ReFocus: The Films of Denis Villeneuve
  • Edited by Jeri English, Marie Pascal
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • The nimble, creative spirit of Québécois screenwriter and filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve, is reflected in his varied body of work. Villeneuve explores questions of alterity and interculturality, of language and identity, of memory and forgetting, of violence and retribution, throughout his filmography: 'Un 32 août sur terre' (1998), 'Maelström' (2000), 'Polytechnique' (2009), 'Incendies' (2010), 'Enemy' (2013), 'Prisoners' (2013), 'Sicario' (2015), 'Arrival' (2016), 'Blade Runner 2049' (2017) and 'Dune: Part 1' (2021).This edited collection brings together original works of scholarship on all of Villeneuve's feature films from different theoretical approaches, in order to deepen our understanding of this important and yet relatively understudied director; read individually or as a collective whole, these studies reveal important elements of Villeneuve's filmic practice, as well as the evolutions of his oeuvre.

ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi
  • Edited by Penny Bouska, Sotiris Petridis
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • Angelidi's work has become synonymous with Greek Experimental Cinema, while her films and her theoretical writings have been the subject of numerous film courses, critical essays and retrospectives. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, comprise her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of different filmic elements which characterize her work are examined in depth in this edited collection dedicated to Antoinetta Angelidi's oeuvre.

ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell
  • Edited by Matthew Melia
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    18 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • Ken Russell was among the most provocative, creative, original and important directors in British film and television history but his career and legacy have long suffered under the media clichés of 'Madman' or 'Enfant Terrible' of British cinema - nicknames which have tended to delegitimise his status and pioneering role in post-war film and television culture.

    This scholarly edited collection refuses these terms and aims to not only reflect and further current critical research into Russell's work but to see Russell as the Renaissance man of British cinema. It brings together the work of new and established scholars as well as the reflections of those who knew and worked with Russell. ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell offers new perspectives across the breadth of Russell's extensive career in television, film and other mediums, and seeks to better understand not only his reception, but the importance of collaboration to his practice, and the legacy of the man himself.