The Making of Alternative Cinema: Volume 2, Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers

Liza Bear's Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers explores the world cinema of the past 25 years, and celebrates its range and diversity by paying detailed attention to the creative process. It contains roughly 50 interviews with, and short pieces on directors and other artistic collaborators from over twenty countries, primarily in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Liza Bear's incisive interviews provide immediate and rapid insights into directors' key themes and concerns. Her continual attention to bodies of work also allows the directors to explain what guided them in their respective movements towards and away from certain themes and genres. While directors are notorious for keeping their cards close to their chest, most of the interviews provided here have a stunning degree of openness and honesty, perhaps because many of these voices have had such a hard time getting heard in the first place.The dialogues examine, among other issues: the sources of the scripts, how the films get made and, where possible, the socioeconomic and cultural conditions under which the directors have worked, from Argentina to Iran to Romania. In addition to the interviews, there is an introduction by noted author Robin Andersen that elucidates recurrent themes arising out of the discussions, a foreword by Laurence Kardish, Film Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, filmographies, and numerous photographs.