Decolonising the Film Industry

A film made in one culture can arrive before an international audience carrying an additional burden. Alongside telling its story, it may be expected to explain its customs, translate its humour, contextualise its politics and make unfamiliar behaviour intelligible to people whose own cultural assumptions rarely require the same introduction. Festivals and distributors need context, audiences encounter unfamiliar worlds through context, and translation makes circulation possible. Yet somewhere inside that practical process lies a more interesting question: which films are allowed to feel universal before anybody has explained where they came from?

Global cinema is considerably larger than its most visible international canon. UNESCO data has shown developing countries producing the majority of the world’s feature films, while industries such as those in India and Nigeria sustain enormous volumes of culturally and linguistically specific work. Much of this cinema already possesses audiences, conventions, stars and narrative traditions capable of functioning without reference to Hollywood or European art cinema. The hierarchy often appears later, when films travel and encounter institutions built around different assumptions about pacing, genre, authorship and audience expectation.

Every cinematic tradition has conventions. Power determines which conventions get to look neutral.

Language offers a small illustration. The Academy’s International Feature Film rules define the category through production outside the United States and predominantly non-English dialogue. The category creates valuable international visibility, while its terminology also reveals an organising centre: one national cinema occupies the unmarked space and others enter through a category describing their internationality. Similar habits appear in everyday criticism. “World cinema” somehow manages to contain most of the world while remaining a specialist shelf.

Filmmakers learn these hierarchies long before anyone formally teaches them. A regional story may acquire explanatory dialogue for an imagined international audience. Cultural references are simplified because somebody worries they will not travel. Narrative rhythms shift towards structures considered easier to programme or finance. None of these decisions automatically damages a film; translation and adaptation are themselves creative acts. The danger appears when the filmmaker begins anticipating an external standard so thoroughly that the standard becomes indistinguishable from good storytelling.

Fromm’s idea of social character helps explain how this happens. Societies internalise recurring economic and cultural demands until particular ways of thinking begin to feel self-evident. Film cultures do something similar. Conventions inherited through education, criticism, financing and distribution gradually become common sense. Decolonisation therefore requires curiosity about where that common sense came from, whose experience it describes well, and where another cinematic grammar might reveal something it cannot.

This leaves room for many centres. Tamil cinema can carry its own memory of performance, music and popular storytelling. Senegalese cinema can emerge from another political and aesthetic history. Japanese, Mexican, Iranian or Māori filmmakers can inherit, reject and combine traditions without passing through a single cultural checkpoint first. Interaction between these traditions can produce new forms because exchange becomes richer when everyone brings something intact enough to exchange.

Cinema becomes genuinely global when unfamiliarity no longer counts as a defect requiring correction.

Sometimes the audience can do some of the travelling.