“Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things. As things they are present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around.” (Larkin 2013, 329) The projected film outshines the infrastructures which enable its movement (physical and digital distribution networks, TV, video, etc.) towards its public appearance (analog and digital projection technology, theatres, private screens, electricity, data networks). Below these more obvious infrastructures which transport filmic matter to audiences, lie those which are less material or less easily recognizable: those of professional education (schools, universities), the regulation and trade of ideas and concepts (development and writing labs, pitches, markets), of financing (public and private funding bodies, corporate capital), production (studios, film stock and equipment manufacturers, labour and the networked knowledge it generates), political control (censorship bodies, copyright, legislation), appreciation (festivals, cinémathèques, criticism) and preservation (archives, private collections). In its infrastructures, the various material and immaterial, technological and textual, aesthetic, economic, social, (geo)political, legal, and institutional aspects of cinema intersect. It is at these intersections that the conditions of cinema as culture and industry originate, often appearing to act like an ‘invisible hand,’ determining which films are more likely to be made, to circulate, to be seen. In this sense, “infrastructures are not neutral, but they operate upon the objects they traffic.” (Larkin 2019, 114) An infrastructural perspective on cinema “displaces the cinematic. Under this analysis film can never refer to either text or the physical substance of celluloid alone but is dispersed into a broader political economy” (118). This political economy of cinema is largely organised in national markets and public spheres, that are transnationally linked within globalised capitalism. In a system of competing and cooperating nations and their publics, infrastructure plays a double role: 1) Its history coincides with the history of imperialism, and infrastructural development often served as legitimation of colonial and imperial rule (Thapa 2023, 175f.). 2) Its representational function aesthetically naturalises such claims in the form of a technological sublime, which has been endlessly reproduced in infrastructural projects such as dams, bridges, and highways becoming part of national(ist) iconographies. This interrelation has been present in cinema from its beginning: The actualities of the Société Lumière validated the extensive permeation of the world by colonial infrastructures at the onset of the 20th century, visually linking peripheries to imperial centres, while simultaneously displaying the modern infrastructures that enabled the circulation of moving images as material and textual matter. The importance of control over infrastructure in the creation of an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial cinema has for instance been noted at the Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in 1973 (Larkin 2019, 118f.). Between the nationalist and internationalist aspects of such interventions and their critique, from a feminist point of view for example (Saglier 2022), the intersectional capacity of film practices to address and challenge hegemony appears as an infrastructural issue.