Largely based on years of bringing often challenging foreign language films from around the world to the attention of often grudging undergraduates, this archive seeks to offer students, educators, and cinephiles alike insights as well as information, prompts as well as provocations to help them discuss, write about, teach, and better understand some of the best films produced on a global stage over the last 30 years. The archive consists of five sections, four devoted to regional affiliations reflective of the way films are often grouped in academic courses and arthouse film series alike, namely, East Asian Cinema, Latin American Cinema, Cinema of the New Europe, and North African & Middle Eastern Cinema. The fifth section contains three sample syllabi from Contemporary World Cinema courses in which many of the titles in the other sections were screened and taught.

Each film-specific entry offers selected filmographies for the directors in question, cast lists for the major characters/actors in their respective films, and, in most instances, information that helps viewers orient themselves to the political and cultural factors that inform, and social codes that are embedded, in the films addressed. But the body of each entry is comprised of the viewing notes themselves, which variably consist of notations about a film’s featured content or style, both pointed and open-ended questions about content, point of view, editing, reception, cinematography, etc., in short everything that goes into the making, watching, and responding to a film. Often intercut in each entry of viewing notes are brief quoted passages from interviews with directors and from film reviews as well as longer excerpts from film theorists and scholars, including from manifestos or meditations written by the directors themselves. I also include sample syllabi of the courses in which these films were screened and discussed and supplemental reading lists.