The child has existed in cinema since the Lumière Brothers filmed their babies having messy meals in Lyons, but it is only quite recently that scholars have paid serious attention to her/his presence on screen. Scholarly discussion is now of the highest quality and of interest to anyone concerned not only with the extent to which adult cultural conversations invoke the figure of the child, but also to those interested in exploring how film cultures can shift questions of agency and experience in relation to subjectivity. Childhood and Nation in World Cinema recognizes that the range of films and scholarship is now sufficiently extensive to invoke the world cinema mantra of pluri-vocal and pluri-central attention and interpretation. At the same time, the importance of the child in figuring ideas of nationhood is an undiminished tic in adult cultural and social consciousness. Either the child on film provokes claims on the nation or the nation claims the child. Given the waning star of national film studies, and the widely held and serious concerns over the status of the nation as a meaningful cultural unit, the point here is not to assume some extraordinary pre-social geopolitical empathy of child and political entity. Rather, the present collection observes how and why and whether the cinematic child is indeed aligned to concepts of modern nationhood, to concerns of the State, and to geo-political organizational themes and precepts.

Introduction: nation, film, child Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (University of New South Wales, Australia); Emma Wilson (Corpus Christi College, UK); Sarah Wright (University of London, UK)Home and away1. 'A bath, a toilet and a field': dreaming and deprivation in Lynne Ramsay's RatcatcherVicky Lebeau (University of Sussex, UK)2. Lost and found: children in Indigenous Australian cinemaGreg Dolgopolov (University of New South Wales, Australia)3. 'Away from girlhood': Catherine Breillat's BluebeardEmma Wilson (Corpus Christi College, UK)Disappearance and removal4. The lost children of Latvia: deportees and postmemory in Dzintra Geka's The Children of Siberia Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Klara Bruveris (University of New South Wales, Australia)5. Among the Nations: Children as Czechs, Germans and Jews in post-1980 Czech cinematic representations of the Second World WarJan Lánícek (University of New South Wales, Australia)6. Child, cinema, dictatorship: Ignacio Agüero's One Hundred Children Waiting for a TrainSarah Wright (University of London, UK)Education and Serious Games7. Graphic tales: class, violence and South Korean childhood in Sang-Ho Yeon's The King of PigsSusan Danta (University of New South Wales, Australia)Citizenship in the classroom: the politicisation of child subjects in Nicolas Philibert's To Be and To Have and Laurent Cantet's The ClassVictoria FlanaganEducation, destiny, and national identity in Raúl Ruiz's Manoel on the Island of WondersStefan Solomon (University of New South Wales, Australia)An allegorical childhood: identity and coming of age in Terry Loane's Mickybo and MeJennifer R. Beckett (University of Melbourne, Australia)PerformanceTerrorism and trainers in a transnational remake: child labour and commodity culture in the Bollywood adaptation of New Iranian Cinema's Children of HeavenMichael Lawrence (University of Sussex, UK)The child as hyphen: Yamina Benguigui's Inch'allah DimancheHannah Kilduff (University of Cambridge, UK)Beiqing, kuqing and national sentimentality in Liu Junyi's Left-behind ChildrenZitong Qiu and Maria Elena Indelicato (Zhejiang University, China)Children's toys, Argentine nationhood and blondness in Albertina Carri's Barbie Gets Sad Too and Néstor F. and Martín C.'s Easy MoneyJordana Blejmar (University of Liverpool, UK)BibliographyFilmography