The History of Foreign Film

A film is only foreign from somewhere else.

The History of Foreign Film tells the story of how movies have crossed borders-and how audiences around the world have encountered cinema made somewhere else.

Through one hundred films spanning the beginnings of cinema to the twenty-first century, Nick Lyons traces the changing systems that made international film culture possible. Films traveled through imported prints and traveling exhibitors, festivals and art houses, television and home video, DVDs and piracy, and eventually digital platforms and streaming. Subtitles and dubbing opened some borders while censorship, politics, economics, and unequal access closed others.

Each chapter begins with a film but tells a larger history. The book explores filmmakers and movements, distributors and exhibitors, festivals and technologies, political upheaval and cultural exchange, and the different lives a movie could have at home, within its region, and after traveling abroad.

The result is not a ranking of the world's greatest films or a country-by-country survey. It is a history of international cinema built around a deceptively simple idea: a film becomes "foreign" when it crosses a border and meets a new audience.

From the earliest moving images to a world of festivals, home media, digital circulation, and streaming, The History of Foreign Film examines how movies traveled-and how that movement changed cinema itself.

One hundred films. More than a century of border-crossing cinema. A history of how the world learned to watch films from somewhere else.