What would a map of Paranational Cinema look like? And how would such a map be made? The prefix «para-» allows to question the subsumption of the varied aspects that cinema encompasses—industry, art, and culture, object of research and historiography—into nations and nation-states, as national cinemas in an international context, and often operating transnationally. The certainty of belonging and property, of territorial and historical coherence, of political, economic, and sociocultural organization that these entities provide comes with the price of exclusion and oppression.

Cinema before or after the nation state, in opposition to or effaced by it, complicates and unsettles the certainty of easy categorization. «Para-» qualifies the relations of specific cinema practices to such entities to highlight trajectories of disruption and dispersal that also challenge the centrality of ‘the film’ for conceptions of cinema, as well as forms of community that do not coincide with geopolitical maps. While nation-building can be a prerequisite for self-determination, it is also a tool for integration in neo-colonial structures and continued dispossession, particularly in postcolonial contexts. This ambiguity suggests ways of thinking cinema practices in an incoherent, multi-faceted relation.

The two-day event at the University of Zurich and the Xenix Kino, part of the SNSF-supported project «Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices», aims to bring together positions that scrutinize exactly the interface of organizing and thinking cinema in other ways: Dedication to research on practices and material that defy the easy compartmentalization of national cinema(s) also requires a consideration of how methodologies are implicated in creating entities of certainty rather than accounting for the less orderly realities of Paranational Cinema.

16 October, 2025 - University of Zurich (UZH), including two screenings at the Xenix Kino

17 October, 2025 - Xenix Kino, Zurich