Arab Cinema Travels Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond

More than simply a survey of film across the Arab region, Arab Cinema Travels offers a fascinating and expansive examination of Arab film culture in wider historical and geopolitical contexts. Centred on the movement of moving pictures, it explores the considerable impacts of travel and mobility on the nature of Arab cinema – from migration and expulsion, to pilgrimage and tourism.

Starting with the inventive traditions of Arabic travelogues, the text traces the manifold pathways that converge in the cinemas of Syria, Palestine and Dubai. Syrian production bursts out of long-held practices of studying abroad, this time in the film schools of the Eastern Bloc. Palestinian movies react to international assumptions about the Holy Land, informed by pilgrimage accounts – ironizing the supposed freedoms of the road movie. Dubai launches its fledgling industry off the back of centuries' worth of trade route management, logistics expertise and labour migration.

Contributing to the burgeoning field of transnational cinema studies, this compelling, buoyant and urgent text is essential reading for students of Film, Media Studies, Communication Studies, Arabic, Middle Eastern Studies and Tourism.

Kay Dickinson is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Canada. She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008); the editor of Movie Music (Routledge, 2002), Teen TV (British Film Institute Publishing, 2003), and The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics and Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). In addition, she has worked as an education officer on the Ramallah International Film Festival and as an advisor on the Shashat Women's Film Festival (Bethlehem, Nablus and Ramallah). In the academic year of 2010-11, she was awarded a Fellowship in Global Aesthetics at Cornell University.

Acknowledgments
Setting Off
1. Fellow Travellers: Approaches To and Through the Journey
2. Red and Green Stars in Broad Daylight: A Socialist Talab al-'Ilm for Syrian State Cinema
3. The Road of Most Resistance: Film-making of the Second Palestinian Intifada 
4. 'Travel and Profit from It': Dubai's Forays into Film
Outgoing Cargo
Notes
Bibliography 
Index