New book: Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe

Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe

ISBN (13): 978-1-9066-7803-6 (paperback)
Price £17.99 (UK), $29.00 (US)
257pp.

Available for purchase from: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks 
and from online booksellers, Amazon.

In the past decade, the dramatic rise in migration and the demise of national borders
across the ‘new’ Europe have helped to turn human traffic into one of the dominant
narratives of contemporary cinema. /Moving People, Moving Images /focuses on the current
cycle of films that play upon global anxieties about trafficking and reflects on recent
films that depict white slavery, drug trafficking and undocumented labour. The volume
considers a range of films including the work of internationally renowned directors such
as /Promised Land /(Amos Gitaï), /Lorna’s Silence /(the Dardenne Brothers) and /Ghosts
/(Nick Broomfield), popular genres such as /Taken /(Pierre Morel), and lesser known but
unquestionably important works such as /The Bus/ (Tunç Okan) and /When Mother Comes Home
for Christmas/ (Nilita Vachani).

***

Moving People, Moving Images/ is a groundbreaking and much-needed study of the
intersections between film and human trafficking… This volume is both a complete and
valuable teaching tool, and a precious resource for future research, and sets the agenda
for more work in this all-important area.’
--- Laura Rascaroli, University College Cork, Ireland

One of the attractions of this book is precisely that it refuses to tread lightly and
tentatively across the well-established divide between cinematic representations and
socio-political issues. It makes a provocative argument for the political effect of
films and proposes that human trafficking should not be the rightful, let alone the
exclusive, domain of governments, NGOs, activist organizations and the social sciences.’

-- Aniko Imre, University of Southern California

About the authors:

William Brown teaches Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. His research
interests include digital technology and cinema, cognitive approaches to cinema, and
transnational cinema. His work has been published in various journals and edited
collections, and he is the co-editor of /Deleuze and Film/ (Edinburgh University Press,
2011). He is the editor/manager of the collaborative film blog,
http://cinemasalon.ning.com

Dina Iordanova has built an academic career as a specialist on the cinema of Eastern
Europe and the Balkans. Her more recent work is focused on business models and
distribution patterns within the international film industries. She is Director of the
Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she leads The
Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Dynamics of World Cinema’
(www.st-andrews.ac.uk/worldcinema). She is also the editor and publisher of the /Film//
Festival Yearbook/ (FFY) series, which has recently released /Film Festival Yearbook 2:
Film Festivals and Imagined Communities/. Her recent work appears in /Cinema at the
Periphery/ (2010) and her blog, /Dinaview.com/.

Leshu Torchin teaches Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Her research focus
is on screen media, advocacy, and human rights. Her work has appeared in a range of
publications including /Third Text/, /Film & History/, /American Anthropologist/, and
/Cineaste/ and in collections such as /The Image and the Witness//: Trauma, Memory and
Visual Culture /(Wallflower, 2007). She is currently completing her book project,
/Creating the Witness: Genocide in the Age of Film, Video and the Internet/.